When exam boards get it wrong...

Before I start, this is not a blog in which I bash the exam boards. In all the dealings I have had with them I have found them to be staffed by people who really want to get it right. Care is taken in designing specs and examinations, good support is offered and questions are answered to the best of their ability. They do not always get things right, but I have never encountered anything that looked like anything other than good intent.

However, there is no getting away from the fact that when exam boards DO get it wrong, it can have the most apalling results for some candidates.

Some supposed errors by exam boards are nothing of the kind of course, but in the mind of the average Daily Mail reader they point to "falling standards". This year's example was the AQA Biology exam which included a question about Darwin which asked candidates to explain why he was depicted as an ape. "This is not science!" screamed the media. Maybe, maybe not. But it WAS on the syllabus and in the text book published. It was worth 2 marks I believe, and if candidates were confused, then that is the fault of their teachers.

Most errors are caught early enough for a simple erratum notice to be included in the instructions.

The AQA mislabelling an extra as from chaper 6 instead of chapter 7 for example, was careless, and I am sure that someone will have got their wrist slapped, but it was hardly enough to make pupils "angry" and "disappointed" as it was reported in the media. The erratum notice was issued and the error pointed out to candidates before the exam started.  

The AQA are also being slated for the "confusing" Inspector Calls question. Apparently, some students couldn't work out that Mrs Birling and Sybil Birling are the same character. There are only a handful of characters in the play which students have been studying for two whole years, so really they should know her first name. Her name is ironic by the way - in Greek myth the sybil was able to read the future.

The real upset was that students missed the s on Mrs or were expecting a question on Mr Birling so they wrote about him instead. That's not the exactly the AQA's fault. What are we poor beleaguered teachers always saying? Read the question kids, read the question! However, an exam board should be aware that under pressure candidates do get confused. And when the difference between two characters' names is one letter s then some care needs to be taken to help the kids out.

If, by the way, you are a candidate who made that mistake, don't worry too much. You will still get marks - probably quite a lot of them - because your comments will be relevant to AO2 and AO3 if not AO1. 

More embarrassing was the OCR error in a question which asked how Tybalt's hatred of the Capulets affected the outcomes of the play - or something like that. Oooops. There is a moment at the Capulet ball where old Capulet tells him off and forbids him from ousting Romeo (a Montague for the sake of clarity) from the house. In this moment Tybalt may, in his hot-headed way, be said to hate his uncle - but it's a stretch to say the least. He may also have had mixed feelings about his wee cousin who married his sworn enemy. Again, I am reaching.  

This time - as far as I can glean - there ws no erratum notice and students were confused and then angry. And they have a right to be in this case. How on earth did THAT happen?

OFQUAL will of course get more involved in this one. Firstly, to ensure that the problem is resolved in such a way that candidates' grades are not affected, and secondly to make sure that such an error can never again be made.

Just how did that question get through the checks and balances of the board? How many pairs of eyes did that question pass under on its way to the nation's exam halls? Or indeed, how few?

There's no excuse for sloppiness on this scale, but I do have to wonder whether what we are seeing is a result of the pressure exam boards have been put under to produce so many new specifications and examinations all at once. Do they actually have the expertise and resources necessary to do the pristine job expected and required of them? 

And if they don't, and it seems they do not, they whose fault is that?

How does it come to be that AQA GCSE maths papers are found floating down the street in Northern Ireland? Yes, I know that there is a courier involved and that perhaps there was nothing that the board could have done to prevent it happening, but it seems as if something of this nature occurs every year.

Is it time to reconsider how our exam boards are funded? The OCR and AQA are both charities - that seems strange in the way that it is strange to me that the RNLI are a charity. We rely on the expertise of these organisations and yet they are not government funded?

Edexcel has sloughed off its charity status, teamed up with Pearson, and has become a billion pound commercial juggernaught. This just seems wrong to me too - like they are trying to pull a Steve Jobs number on education.

I am not a fan of having just one exam board - the idea of a monopoly sends shivers up my socialist spine. I don't want sticky Whitehall paws any closer to the exams than they absolutely have to be. I just want to have total confidence in the system that it will get it right for the kids.