Exam errors - statement by Glenys Stacey, Chief Executive of Ofqual
Thursday, 16 June 2011 15:43
I can confirm that following our letter of June 7, Ofqual has received assurances from awarding organisations offering GCSE and A level exams that additional quality checks have been carried out on all papers being sat between that date and the end of the exam series on June 28.
Candidates can therefore be assured that everything that can be done has been done to prevent any further errors on question papers.
Any candidates faced with a difficult question should therefore treat it as such, as it is highly unlikely to be the result of an error. The best advice for students when faced with a question they are finding difficult is to move on, complete the rest of the paper and come back to it later.
Students who have sat one of the question papers that included a mistake can be assured that the awarding organisations have procedures in place to make sure that so far as possible, no candidate is disadvantaged.
The measures taken will depend on the exact circumstances. Ofqual has asked the awarding organisations for detailed information on the actions they have taken already and will be taking during the awarding process. We will be looking closely at this information to make sure we are satisfied.
Further to this, we will be discussing quality assurance procedures with the awarding organisations to make sure lessons are learnt from these unacceptable errors.
Further information:
Up to the close of Thursday, June 9, Ofqual is aware of problems with individual questions within six of approximately 5,000 different GCSE, AS and A level exam papers scheduled during this summer series for candidates in England. While this is a small proportion of the total number of papers any errors of this nature are unacceptable. The six papers are:
| Awarding organisation | Subject | Qualification |
| AQA | Business Studies | AS level |
| AQA | Geography | AS level |
| AQA | Computing | AS level |
| Edexcel | Biology | AS level |
| OCR | Decision Mathematics | AS level |
| CCEA | Business Studies | GCSE |
Ofqual does hold some information on incidents of errors on live exam papers reported to predecessor bodies. (Ofqual was created in 2010). Our reporting arrangements will be different to those in place in the past and so we can not state for certain that these figures below capture every incident that occurred. The figures below should therefore be treated with caution, and not used to draw direct comparisons with this year’s figures.
Live exam paper errors reported to the regulator:
2006 – One incident (GCSE)
2007 - One incident - A level
2008 - Three incidents - Two GCSE and one A level
2009 – No incidents
2010 - No incidents
