What action has Ofqual taken as a result of errors in examinations this summer?
Wednesday, 22 June 2011 09:36
There has been a series of unacceptable errors in this summer’s GCSE and GCE AS and A2 examinations. Each awarding organisation is responsible for the quality of its examination papers and Ofqual is holding each of them to account for their errors.
Awarding organisations notified Ofqual about 6 errors in papers sat between 16 May and 7 June.
On 7 June, Ofqual, on behalf of the three qualifications' regulators in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, wrote to each awarding organisation offering GCSEs and A levels requiring additional quality checks on the examinations that had yet to be sat, to ensure no further avoidable errors occurred. Each awarding organisation provided Ofqual with written assurances by 13 June that such additional quality checks had been or would be made before papers were sat.
Since 7 June a further two errors in questions papers have been identified as well as a printing error in a paper, and we have received a serious complaint about instructions to centres about the use of a particular mark scheme. This is unacceptable as it affects candidates and it brings into question the assurances that Ofqual received. We are taking immediate steps to require awarding organisations to confirm the actions that have been taken in relation to the examination papers still to be sat between now and 28 June when this series of GCSEs and A levels comes to an end.
Our concerns are serious enough that our Director of Regulation is meeting with the Chief Executive of OCR today to understand how these recent errors occurred and to make sure, so far as possible, that there will be no more avoidable errors.
Tomorrow the qualifications regulators are meeting with each of the CEOs of the awarding organisations offering GCSEs and A levels and will again ask for confirmation that there will be no more avoidable errors.
Once the exams are over next week we will be announcing full details of an Inquiry into the errors this summer. Each of the errors will be investigated so that we and those responsible for the errors understand the root causes and so that the awarding organisations take all the necessary steps to address them. We want to understand how this pattern of errors occurred, how errors remained after additional checks had been made and what needs to be done to prevent any recurrence of such avoidable errors.
Candidates who have been affected by these errors can be assured that we are checking the actions awarding organisations are taking to make sure that candidates are not unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged.
