Leading English academics and former HSC chief examiners have warned that plans to make HSC English exams shorter and put word limits on answers will make it easier for students to game the system and will "further fuel the HSC tutoring industry". The submission warns that the tutoring industry would benefit from the introduction of shorter answers because students would pay to be taught how to "memorise and then reproduce" 600-word responses for their exams.

High School Certificate (HSC) students are becoming increasingly brazen in their attempts to cheat their way to higher scores, with more than 300 instances of plagiarism recorded in the past year, new data from the Board of Studies reveals. This year, the highest number of cheaters has once again been found across the HSC English subjects with 188 instances of malpractice across the four levels compared to just 15 for all the mathematics courses. Business services had the highest ratio of cheating students, with 9.8 caught per every 1,000.

A high-ranking Victorian education department official accused of running a corrupt scheme to siphon off money from school funding has been sacked. Former education department financial management general manager is the first scalp to be claimed by the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption (IBAC) hearings.