A café in Melbourne’s north-west is being inundated with negative reviews after a café with a similar name was featured in the VCE English exam.
Calmer Café in Aberfeldie has received over 100 negative Google reviews since yesterday, when thousands of students across the state sat the exam.
According to The Age, some local students headed to the café after the exam and told café manager Elise Jenkins, “we are sorry this is happening to you”.
In the exam, students were asked to analyse a critical review of the Calmer Coffee café, written by a fictional man named Jonty Jenkins, who happens to have the same last name as the real café’s manager.
The exam question.
The question describes Calmer Coffee as an example of the “soulless franchises that can be found at airports around the world”, and the review students were asked to analyse criticised the café’s “exhaustive list of frappes, soy and almond milks”, and employees sporting man buns.
According to The Age, many of the reviews being written about the real café make reference to the fictional one, with students complaining about “some ignoramus with a man bun served me the most disgusting coffee”.
While the circumstances aren’t exactly the same (namely, this year’s incident is lacking the element of racism), this is reminiscent of the abuse Indigenous poet Ellen van Neerven received last year after one of her poems was featured in the HSC English exam.
That abuse turned out to be the work of one Facebook group of year 12 students deciding that abusing van Neerven was a reasonable response to not understanding her poem, and the coordinated nature of this effort to leave negative reviews makes me think this is a similar case.
We’ve all gone through year 12, and we know how stressful it can be. But trying to blow off steam or make your mates laugh by taking your frustrations out on real people is incredibly immature.
Online reviews are hugely important to small businesses – Google reviews now come up underneath a business’ contact information automatically, for everyone to see. The café currently does not come up in Google search results at all.
A spokesperson for the VCAA, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, told The Age:
“The VCAA has been in contact with Calmer Cafe management and understands the posts have caused the business considerable effort and inconvenience.”
The café’s manager told The Age:
“I’m shaking from head to foot. We are a small business and these reviews mean a lot.”
They’re trying to turn the situation into a positive, however; any year 12 student who visits the café, presents their ID and mentions the exam question will receive a free coffee.
