AIBU to ask current or former GCSE examiners what happens with illegible handwriting?

I wouldn't put that writing anywhere near the category of 'illegible'. What you've shared is a blurry photo of a snippet in isolation, but I don't think most examiners would struggle to read an essay written like that as when you're reading actual sentences, your eye makes sense of it much better than it would from the picture you've posted out of context.

Don't worry. The teachers have said they can read it. He will have had several teachers across his subjects and if they couldn't read it (in mocks, for example) he would have been referred to use a laptop in lessons as a normal way of working so he could use one or a scribe in his exams.
Think of exam boards as having different tiers of examiners. If examiner 1 can't read it,it would be passed to a group leader, then someone else. Once, in my 20 years of teaching thousands of students, I had the exam board (for English) contact our school and ask if anyone at our school could read the handwriting of a student. Their English teacher could and was asked to transcribe the student's papers and submit them.

Hi. As someone else said, the examiner flags it to the board and someone else with experience of deciphering poor handwriting looks at it. At a very quick glance, however, I can decipher at least some of this so I think your son will be fine.

Definitely this! 😂
A few ‘Oh FFS’ have been uttered from my office during exam season. The more grumpy it has made me, the less inclined I am to be generous.

Yep! Science marker here too. I have never passed on something I can’t read, they just don’t get the mark. Exam marking is very time consuming and pretty poorly paid for the hours we put in. Also we don’t mark full papers these days, just individual questions which are uploaded so each exam paper can potentially be marked by several different examiners. I have seen much worse than your son’s handwriting so I wouldn’t worry too much. I’m sure the school would have sorted alternative arrangements if they had been concerned.

Did you know Occupational Therapists can assess handwriting? I didn’t until my eldest was seen at the age of 16. I honestly thought she was just being careless and had messy handwriting, until she had a formal OT handwriting assessment and scored very poorly on the DASH test. In her case it had been flagged up by the school though. She ended up being allowed to use a word processor (laptop) for her exams on the advice from OT. Some areas allow self-referral which makes access a bit easier too.

It really is worth trying to make writing reasonably legible. Some years ago I examined for a different type of exam. When I had to decipher bad writing I could feel myself getting progressively more bad tempered, and I had to work hard to tell myself that it mustn't affect my attitude to the final mark I awarded. But I wouldn't like to swear that I completely succeeded.

We had some cases where the problem didn't show up until the candidate reached the stage of having to write under pressure in their first prelim/mock.

I did have one awful case with a junior pupil that I can't go into in full. Suffice to say that I put piece of imaginative writing to the bottom of my marking pile because the handwriting was so bad. When I finally deciphered it, I took it to the pupil's pastoral teacher, so disturbing was the content.

The pupil is now an adult and unlikely to see the light of day again.

They have crap handwriting because their fine motor skills develop later than girls which is later than they learn handwriting. Also girls tend to care more about presentation.

Fascinating the vast majority of replies relate to boys.

I am a senior examiner. I can read his writing-I’ve seen far worse. I’ll always try my best to decipher-but not all examiners will take the time.

This should have been sorted out a couple of years ago really.

As a former examiner, this is far from the worst I’ve seen! It’s not illegible.

My writing is awful and they didn’t seem to have any issues when I was at school. I don’t have any diagnosed conditions other than my brain works faster than my hand so I am trying to get stuff on paper as fast as I can! I think like I read, at warp speed and my handwriting goes downhill

I did too when I had a kid whose writing looked like knitting and I had to transcribe it before it was sent off. It was a gruesome experience!
I refer everyone with tricky handwriting for handwriting support in year ten when I start teaching them.

Thank you.

I know that SLTs in Scotland prefer the option of allowing the candidate to type.

Transcriptions were removed as an option some time ago in JCQ regulated exams

I have. But it's very very rare. Maybe one or two scripts a year out of literally hundreds.

It used to happen in Scotland - transcription could be put in place. It was supposed to be someone who knew the pupil's handwriting but had no interest in whether or not they passed that particular exam.

If the pupil concerned had dyslexia, then the accommodation might be transcription with correction, but that's a different scenario.

Just to add an explanation: my difficulty is because the picture is a wee bit blurred, not because of the handwriting.

I think it's in the "mere mortals struggle, teachers will be fine" category. Just make sure he spaces things out if he can - but ultimately his focus needs to be on the exams not his handwriting. They won't be worried because if they were they would have brought it up. If the thing about a known teacher deciphering is true I guess that could be worth enquiring about but I've never heard of it.

A friend"s son used a laptop as already mentioned.

I dropped cursive naturally in secondary. I never understood why on earth they forced us to learn that in primary because by secondary nobody gives a shit how you write! Then you go to uni and everything is typed… Cursive is just a waste of everyone’s time.

My son’s writing was deemed not legible (I thought it was fine 🤷‍♀️) but it meant he got 25% extra time in exams - so GCSEs and now A levels which has been a godsend, not necessarily just for handwriting but for everything! Has your son been assessed?

I can read some of that. I suspect that I'd manage better if the focus was a bit sharper and I could see the entire page.

I was in the secondary sector in Scotland, but sometimes had to transcribe papers for pupils.