Cheating in GCSE exams

My pal used to write his equations out on his thighs and read them when he went to the loo. I used to wonder if they'd limit him on how often he could go but nope.

I would much rather be judged on what I actually produced in an exam than what teachers predicted I would achieve. There’s bound to be human bias in that, plus I was the type of student who did little work all year and then buckled down to ace the exams.

Are you me? No, this was my class in the 70's! Yeah, the very idea of wasting many minutes away from our exam paper unless in a total emergency would not have occurred to us.

Better than them being all wholly disadvantaged by not getting any qualifications, or sitting exams when they’d been unable to access teaching. It would have been better for Covid to not have happened but here we are.

I'm sure it happens, but someone was stupid enough to take the risk, I can't imagine it would make a world of difference to their final grade. You could Google 'what is newton's first law of motion', get your answer and get an extra 2 marks. But in order to gain a significant marks, you'd have to memorise a long question, go to the bathroom, type the entire thing into ChatGPT, memorise the long anwer, then write it out again. If you pull it off, you now have the extra 8 marks to get you from an D to a C, but you've taken a huge risk and wasted a lot of exam time. Someone who was failing isn't going to be able to propel themselves to an A, and you can forget about essay-based exams

it wasn’t an ideal situation, but what was the alternative?
Does it really matter now? When you have passed one set of exams and move on to the next, those exams become less significant. My Dd took her GCSE’s in 2022 and some of the papers were modified and content adapted due to covid. Did it make the exams easier for her? Possibly. As she had not taken any formal exams prior to 2022 it’s impossible to say.
However she is now in her second year at university so the fact that the history of medicine was removed as content from her history gcse and may have made the exam easier for her is largely irrelevant and cant imagine its of interest to anyone.

He could have done worse, better or the same. We both think the grades were harsh in one subject for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. In the long run it made no odds. And please don’t make assumptions about his MH. As it happens he finds an essay or CW deadline more stressful than an exam.

Yes the situation was not ideal, but how dare you suggest that students in those exam years did not deserve their grades. I know how hard ds and his peers worked and what difficulties they put up with. Do you have DC and did they do GCSEs or A levels in 2020/2021?

Ex head of exams here at a very large exam centre - yes cheating happens and if discovered, there are very serious consequences - disqualified from that paper, disqualified from that subject, disqualified from all exams with that board or disqualification from all exams. More common though is a student who has a phone on them by accident and have not been caught using it. The same will happen to them too. We have to inform the exam board who are the one’s who make the decision on punishment - makes it easier for the school/collage as they are totally neutral. I always reported it asap after gathering written statements - sometimes before the student had left the exam hall - you’d be surprised how many times I was offered a bribe by the parents to pretend it never happened!! Having said that, it is quite rare and my invigilators were brilliant at spotting suspicious behaviour

It’s still wrong that they have this advantage over people that did have to take their exams.

There’s no distinction on the exam certificates.

It gave the entire cohort an advantage, not one person.

He could also have done worse if he had taken the exams 🤷‍♀️

It will have benefitted his MH to not have to deal with the stress.

Very suspect logic there.

How exactly does not even having to do the exams in the first place not give an individual an advantage? 🤔

That’s my ds2 who did A levels in 2021. FWIW he did a lot of work. He and I agree he would have done even better if he had taken the exams, so he doesn’t feel he was “given his grades” in the way you describe.

Unpopular opinion indeed. If a school winks at someone cheating as already noted it can be banned from being an exam centre.

@ShanghaiDiva- sounds perfect! Makes life a lot easier. In our room of 180 we pretty much know who’s going to go to the loo first - always the usual suspects!

I know someone whose child realised they had a phone on them part way through an exam and handed it in thinking it was best to do the right thing - unfortunately of course they were disqualified.

Don’t be ridiculous. Cheating is not the same as how exams and assessments were managed during Covid. The key difference being cheating gives one individual an advantage.

No I hear you @TreadSoftlyOnMyDreams mine were not about to resit either!

There’s a good deal of misunderstanding around Oxford and Cambs. But yes, they do look at GCSEs (tho mate of ds got in with a 6 in Eng lang. Not to study English obvs).

V unpopular opinion on here, but I think she’s awesome and you sound jealous.

Those of you who are super-judgemental about cheating, how do you feel about students that were given their qualifications for doing absolutely Fuck All during the Covid pandemic?
Its an absolute joke.

And anyone with the means to pay can cheat coursework by using essay writing services!

You need straight A's in your A levels and according to the prep session I attended for Oxbridge entry they will differentiate candidates where they are oversubscribed by going back to GCSE levels in the same subjects. 🤔

Doesn't really matter, that was the reason she gave me. I'm just another parent so I'm not going to quiz her on whether its Oxbridge or parental pressure to be perfect. There is no way my DD is going to resit maths unless she fails it, she can't wait to see the back of it!

I invigilate the same students in the same room for three sets of exams- two mocks and the summer. There are two of us invigilating and we know all their access arrangements off by heart, who will be first for the loo, who will use their extra time and who will ask a question about the paper despite being told in every single exam that we cannot help them with the answers!
We are also lucky that the room is ours for the duration of the exams and candidate cards and extra time cards etc are left out as we can lock the room when we are not using it.

You don't need all grade 9s for Oxford and Cambridge tho (just as well as they would never fill their places if that was their rule, with about 1200 students getting all 9s last year). I guess if you have a couple of 6s and want to work them up to a 7/8.

I would definitely mention it to the school. We wore long kilts as our uniform (25+ years ago now) and one girl in my year made notes on her legs (?!?!). I have no idea if her intention was to flap the kilt back under the desk or go to the loo to check them, her legs were absolutely covered in biro-ed notes from the knee up. I don’t think anyone told on her, we were all a bit flabbergasted.

Someone did at a school I know and was disqualified from all the exams from that board

@Catlady007007- there may be 180 kids in a hall- we can’t pander to their every need re timing. Unless they have specific additional needs they should be perfectly capable of reading the time and looking at the end time of the exam and working out how much time they’ve got left. If the invigilator was asked and then gave the wrong answer that wouldn’t be great either.