22nd June 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Tens of thousands of students have sat exam papers this summer which contained mistakes. Reported on the BBC, Ofqual, the examinations watchdog, has stated that they are investigating 6 mistakes on papers. Ofqual described the mistakes as “disappointing and unacceptable”, and has ordered urgent extra checks amid complaints from students, teachers and the NUS. Roughly 90,000 students have sat exams which contain mistakes.
Of the papers with mistakes, five are AS levels, and one is a GCSE paper. The GCSE paper is a CCEA Business studies paper, taken mainly by students in Northern Ireland. The other papers included a Geography AQA AS level paper, where a diagram was labelled incorrectly, a Maths OCR AS level paper, where one question was impossible to answer due to insufficient information, a Business Studies AQA AS level paper, which didn’t give enough information, and a Biology Edexcel AS level paper, where a multiple choice question did not have the correct answer as one of the options.
The examining boards concerned have stated that no student will be disadvantaged because everyone will be given full marks for the questions with mistakes. However, students and teachers have pointed out that the stress and confusion caused by the mistakes, affected students’ performances on the rest of the paper. Edwin Li Ping said that a question he would normally have spent 1 minute on, he actually laboured over for 15 minutes before moving on. Natalie Edwards said that the exams are hard enough without these mistakes, and she became stressed when she couldn’t get the answer to what was supposed to be an easy question.
Ofqual will continue to investigate the mistakes, and ultimately have the power to remove an examination board’s right to set public exams if they feel it’s appropriate.