Teacher error and "significant process failures" are being blamed after some final year students at an elite Melbourne school were not taught the complete curriculum in a subject.
Peninsula Grammar found out in October that the delivery of the Visual Communications Design course didn't meet the 2018 Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) standards.
"It was devastating. And we unreservedly apologise to the families and particularly to the students for this occurring," principal Stuart Johnston said.
"We understand this is very stressful time and this would've added to that stress and for that, we are very, very sorry"
Mr Johnston said the school realised what had happened when their 27 students in the course had marks outside the standard.
The school has known about the issue since late October, when it launched an internal investigation.
But it only notified parents yesterday, in order to minimise student stress before marks were released today.
The school said it worked closely with the VCAA, the body which oversees the marking of students' work, to ensure their grades were not affected.
"We can't explain what VCAA does. We're not privy to their processes," Mr Johnston said.
"But we do know when you can identify error and you're honest, that they will do whatever they can to make sure the students are not disadvantaged
"Each student has been awarded a VCD study score accordingly."
As well as teacher error, Mr Johnston also said that the "people who should have been overseeing this and looking after these aspects of compliance probably didn't do their job at the level they needed to do".
"There was a new study this year and the teacher and the faculty didn't take enough time to investigate that curriculum thoroughly and to make the changes both in content and the assessment of that content to improve the students results.
"It was a culmination of a number of oversights and they were significant and they were devastating to the students concerned."
The VCAA said no students would be disadvantaged, but would not explain how they recalculated the scores.
