All errors in exam papers are “unacceptable”, the chief regulator of exams, Sir Ian Bauckham, has said.
Asked by Tes at the Festival of Education to clarify Ofqual’s approach to regulating mistakes in the design of exam papers, Sir Ian said: “The exam boards are required to report them to us every year. We’ve got tens of thousands of scripts, so we do get some [errors], unfortunately.
“My view is none of them are acceptable. They are all unacceptable.”
Sir Ian’s comments follow Tes’ exclusive reporting last week that exam board OCR had apologised to all students and teachers impacted by multiple errors in its A-level physics papers.
Five errors in total were identified by OCR, one of which was not noticed until after the exam was taken.
An OCR spokesperson said last week that the exam board was “sorry to the physics students and teachers affected by errors in A-level physics this year”.
The exam board is investigating its processes and “acting to ensure it does not happen again”.
Sir Ian said that after a mistake is reported by an exam board to Ofqual, it considers the “nature of the error”, what can be done to manage it and “what the adverse impact” is for students.
A decision is then taken as to enforcement, including potential fines, on a case-by-case basis.
“If [the exam board’s mistake] caused serious adverse impacts on students, then a fine could be in scope. But it all depends on the nature,” Sir Ian said.
Exam board fines
Back in 2022, the former chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, Robert Halfon, wrote to then education secretary James Cleverly calling for Ofqual to levy fines on exam boards if their papers contained errors.
Mr Halfon’s letter called 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 their papers and other failings. In 2018, for example, Ofqual fined OCR £175,000 for mixing up the Montague and Capulet families in a question on Romeo and Juliet in its 2017 GCSE English literature paper.
Earlier this year, Pearson was fined £250,000 for failing to “guard against conflicts of interest and breaches of confidentiality” around the design of exams by teachers who could have known which papers their own pupils would sit. Pearson co-operated fully with Ofqual’s enforcement process.
And in 2019, AQA was forced to pay more than £1 million in fines and compensation for multiple failings, including the re-use of a question from a GCSE English literature practice paper in the actual exam and failing to ensure that reviews of marking and moderation were not carried out in their entirety by someone not involved in the original marking.
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