Thousands of pupils given wrong GCSE paper
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Your support makes all the difference.An exam board apologised last night after thousands of GCSE history students were given the wrong exam paper.
An exam board apologised last night after thousands of GCSE history students were given the wrong exam paper.
More than 2,500 history candidates were confronted with a 90-minute exam on medieval justice yesterday morning when the paper should have been on Anglo-Saxon history.
A spokesman for OCR, the Oxford and Cambridge exam board that made the error, said: "We would like to apologise both to candidates and teaching staff for the inconvenience and distress that this error has caused." A paper prepared for a future exam had been sent by mistake, the board said.
The blunder affected students from 61 schools who had chosen to study the crime and punishment option for the OCR schools history project. The course included a paper requiring students to answer questions based on real historical sources. The pupils had been given the topic in advance but did not see the extracts until they sat the exam.
Jonathan Davies, the head of history at King Edward's School, a leading independent boys' school in Birmingham, said the exam error was the worst he had seen in 22 years of teaching. "This is just sloppy. It is gross incompetence," he said. "The system is obviously fundamentally flawed if someone can set completely the wrong exam and no one else in the organisation will notice. It is so off-putting for pupils and teachers. We can only wonder what these fools will do next."
The OCR spokesman said the "skills-based" nature of the paper involved in the latest error meant that candidates could have attempted the questions using the source material, even though they had not revised that topic. But he admitted it would have been difficult for candidates to get high marks without having prepared the topic in advance.
Examiners were devising a new marking scheme to ensure candidates were not disadvantaged by the error, he said.
OCR has already had to apologise this year for a GCSE health studies paper that included inaccurate scientific information. Edexcel faced calls for the withdrawal of its licence after schools complained about potentially misleading printing errors and papers that did not arrive on time.
Britain's biggest exam board, AQA, admitted issuing 40,000 students with a GCSE English literature paper containing questions about poems that were not on the syllabus.
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