Mistakes warning for exam boards

Errors in a geography paper and in a computing paper are the latest to come to light.

Both of the AS-level papers were set by the AQA exam board, one of England’s biggest awarding bodies.

Exams regulator Ofqual issued a warning to the UK’s exam boards to implement urgent extra checks following a string of blunders.

In total, Ofqual says it is now investigating six mistakes in this year’s exams, the majority of which were in AS-level papers.

Ofqual chief executive Glenys Stacey has condemned the errors as “disappointing and unacceptable”.

Students sitting the AQA geography exam on May 24 were given the wrong information in a question worth four marks which asked them to label the fastest part of the river.

All candidates will be awarded full marks for the question, AQA said.

Sixth-formers taking the computing paper on Tuesday were faced with an arrow in a diagram that was shorter than it should have been.

AQA said markers would take into account the effect this may have had on candidates’ answers.

A spokeswoman for the exam board said: “We are very sorry for these mistakes and will ensure that no students will be disadvantaged as a result.”

The other mistakes to come to light so far are:

n A multiple choice question featuring four wrong answers in an Edexcel AS-level biology paper;

n Students sitting an AQA AS-level business paper were faced with a question, worth a maximum of three marks, that did not include the information needed to come up with an answer;

n A maths AS-level paper, set by the OCR exam board, also contained an unanswerable question. The question was worth eight marks.

Exam boards have promised to take the errors into account when marking papers.