however, knowing vcaa/vtac, what makes most sense isnt always what is done by them 
Haha this is also true.
However, I'm going to tend heavily towards scaled in the year undertaken, as that VTAC ABC of Scaling guide states it. They also restate the exact same words in the VICTER guide.
If that is the case, I'm not sure what happened with your friends. How much different were the two different scalings from the previous year to the year they got their scaled score? Is it possible that the source their using to compare to is incorrect etc.
If it isn't the case, I have no idea why VTAC would state it so explicitly.
I guess it would be easiest to confirm with someone who did spesh in year 11 last year. I'm not sure how many people actually do spesh in year 11 though. Are there any other subjects that had drastically different scaling? Most subjects seem to have only changed by 1 or 2 points.
edit: I just checked VICTER 2010 to 2014 for the same sentence, and it appeared in all. Because of that, I'm pretty sure that it's not a typo on VTAC's part. If it were a mistake, you would hope that they would pick up on it after publishing it 5 times.