Proof Readers Marks

Slips 'to blame' for exam errors

The exams watchdog claims that a lapse in due process was "an issue in more than one of the errors" in this year's public examinations.

Ofqual is investigating mistakes by the five exam boards in England, Wales and Northern Ireland which led to 10 errors in exam papers.

Ofqual mandates that a scrutineer must work through each question paper first.

Referring to initial findings, Ofqual said: "It does look on the face of it as if someone hasn't done their job."

An exam paper is first written by a principal examiner. It is then revised and rewritten with any changes implemented.

The paper is then discussed by an examining team in detail, for one to two days, before being typeset and made available to the team for proofreading and checking.

A scrutineer is then meant to sit the paper, as if he or she was a candidate.

These appear to be rigorous procedures.

The mistakes range from incorrectly labelled diagrams in geography to impossible to answer maths and physics questions, and a biology multiple choice question which contained only the wrong answers.

Exam board employees are contractually not allowed to give interviews to the media.

This stems from the necessity of not revealing the contents of exam papers, but in practice it stops examiners discussing any element of the workings of their organisations.

However, one principal examiner who has worked for two of England's three boards (OCR, AQA and Edexcel) for 20 years agreed to speak to the BBC anonymously:

"To give the example of the biology paper, the multiple choice question with the correct answer missing: I can see how the process could let that happen up to a certain point, because the focus is going to be on the so-called distracters, the wrong answers in the multiple choice, because these must be potentially feasible."

"But it should never have got past the scrutiny process," she added.

"If someone does the paper, then the fact that the right answer isn't there will immediately be apparent. And the only thing I can think happened there is that the scrutiny process wasn't done properly."

The BBC has spoken to a number of principal and chief examiners who say that scrutineers are not always adhering to the rules.

One Edexcel employee said "I know of those who have done a close proof read and that's it".

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