Melbourne Cafe Gets Bad Reviews Because of VCE Exam Question

Suzannah Weiss
Updated
It reportedly plans to sue the exam's creators.

For the VCE English exam earlier this week, over 40,000 students in Australia answered a question about a fictional cafe called Calmer Coffee, The Guardian reports. What the exam's creators didn't anticipate was that Calmer Cafe, a similar-sounding establishment in Melbourne, would be affected by the example.

The students had to analyze a fake review of Calmer Coffee by a character named Jonty Jenkins, according to BuzzFeed. It called the cafe "another example of an ever-creeping shift toward soulless franchises that can be found in airports around the world" and complained about its "exhaustive list of frappes, soy, and almond milks," as well as a "tablet-wielding" server sporting a man bun.

Students apparently found this example funny enough to start joking about it online — through real reviews of Calmer Cafe. "What happened to good old fashioned customer service?" one reviewer wrote. "Instead you want to target teenagers and 20 somethings listening to inane music through slick headphones." Another complained, "Absolutely no table service. Unbelievable. Me good mate Marcel wouldn't have done that. Instead I got some stooge with a man bun." On Wednesday alone, the cafe's Google reviews fell from almost 5 stars on average to 3.3, according to The Age.

As one might imagine, Calmer Cafe is not pleased about the bad publicity. The cafe's owner Tara Conron told The Age that she was planning to sue the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), which created the test. "I don't know how much damage this is going to do until further down the track when people who don't know it's a joke read the reviews," she said. "I am so angry." Not only do the names of the cafes sound similar, she added — she actually has an employee with a man bun and a manager with the last name "Jenkins."

A VCAA spokesperson told The Age that the organization had requested a meeting with Calmer Cafe to see how they could help rectify the situation. In the meantime, the cafe's Google rating seems to have jumped back up to 4 stars, thanks to reviews like, "All jokes aside, ignore all the recent 1 star reviews. They are from salty English students."

Related: SAT Questions Allegedly Leaked From Previous Tests Given in Asia

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