MPs call for exam boards to be fined over mistakes
Errors in exam papers this year have been ‘deeply regrettable’ the chair of the commons education committee Robert Halfon has said, as he called on regulator Ofqual to levy fines on exam boards whose papers contained mistakes. In a letter on behalf of the committee to new education secretary James Cleverly, Mr Halfon welcomed that exams had been able to go ahead for the first time since 2019. He also praised the joint decision by the Department for Education and Ofqual to provide ‘advance information’ to candidates about the potential content of papers, in order to help them focus their revision. This measure was intended to help mitigate the educational disruption faced by pupils as a result of the pandemic.
However this advance information proved to be the source of some errors, as exam boards then sent out papers which ignored the advance information. The letter quotes examples of such errors, including an AQA GCSE physics paper which included a question on energy transfers and circuits, despite circuits not being included as a topic for revision in the advance information. Likewise an AQA A-level law paper included a 30-mark question on a topic not listed in advance information. Other more general examples of mistakes given in the letter include an Edexcel GCSE geography paper labelling Gabon as the Republic of Congo on a map of Africa, and an AQA GCSE geography paper featuring a question that included a coloured map and key that were inaccessible to colour blind pupils.
The letter concludes by urging Ofqual to fine exam boards whose papers contained errors, and for the fines to ‘be proportionate to the scale of the errors, and significant enough to act as a strong deterrent’. Exam boards have been fined in the past for mistakes in papers – for example in 2018 the OCR board was fined £175,000 after mixing up the Montague and Capulet families in a question on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The committee also call on exam boards to issue full marks for questions where errors occurred, and ensure this decision is communicated to schools and pupils without delay. AQA has already agreed to issue all pupils with full marks in the case of the question in their GCSE Physics paper.
The committee’s letter was also copied to Ofqual chair Ian Bauckham, and an Ofqual spokesperson said: ‘We have received the Education Committee’s letter and note the contents’ and pointed out that Ofqual had previously written to the education committee about the 2021-22 summer exam series, including the question of exam paper errors. The spokesperson added ‘Ofqual will closely monitor the awarding process to make sure that students are not disadvantaged compared to those taking the same qualification with another exam board. Regulatory action is in scope whenever there are potential breaches of our rules, and is something we will consider once the immediate interests of students are taken into account.’