Year 12 VCE students have been left frustrated after sitting the second general maths exam on Monday, one that contained two errors, with officials only picking up on one beforehand.

An investigation into the mistakes and whether any student was unfairly impacted by them will be undertaken by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA).

Education minister Ben Carroll spoke with the VCAA chief on Tuesday and ordered the immediate investigation.

“We know how stressful doing any exam is for Year 12s and the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority, and myself as minister, unreservedly apologise to the students and their families,” he said.

“It is unacceptable, given the checking in the vetting process, that there were two errors on the exam.

“I want to reassure students and their families, that they will not be impacted by this error that had no fault of their own, and it will have no bearing on their marks…we’ll…get to the bottom of how this occurred.”

The first error is reported to be a typo in question 14 and involved the preamble to part d of the question.

A line mistakenly read: “the maximum decrease in time of any of activity is two days”.

Officials picked up on the blunder and students were advised in their 15-minute reading time to cross out the second ‘of’.

This led to confusion however, as the preamble appeared to be part of part c but was actually meant to be in part d.

The second error was not picked up by officials however, but by some students, and was another typo in a matrix-related question.

Herald Sun report that it was related to numbers in the columns of the communication matrix.

A spokesperson for the Department of Education admitted the two mistakes.

“The first of these was known prior to the commencement and students were instructed to make the necessary amendment prior to starting the exam,” he said.

“The second typo was identified in a matrix-related question. The VCAA will conduct further analysis to investigate how this error appeared in the exam, and will ensure that no student’s score is unfairly impacted because of this mistake, and apologises for undue stress this has caused.”

Students are said to have been stressed throughout the entire exam, with the mistakes just adding further issues.

Many posted about the exam, calling it “brutal” and one student saying “as we left our examination hall, people discussed answers and so many people started tearing up.”

Another said that the girl behind them was just “staring into the distant nothingness” and it looked like her soul had left her body.

Many also pointed to the “weird wording” and “trick questions”, and one educator described it as “written by the devil”.