*Wiifitmama" that's roughly the conclusion that dd and her friends have reached. They've looked into it fairly thoroughly and this is what they say. It's generally dd's best paper, so she really didn't want it to be leaked.
- There was no suggestion of paper 1 being leaked until after Fridays exam.
- Paper 2 was not generally leaked, however there was a school, which has been reported to Edexcel, where some students had a clash, and in the break the invigilator supervising thought the exam papers on the table were for them to practice, however they were the real thing. They also left the children with their phones, so one of them took a picture of the paper and sent it to a friend that had done it that morning. Friend reported it immediately. There were no further suggestions of leaks before Friday's exam.
- There were several people claiming to have Fridays exam for a few days, including various joke ones. None of these were apparently true.
- The first tweets about it being for sale was quite late on Thursday night. They think about 10/10:30pm. It was being offered for £70 at that time, with the blacked out pictures. By the morning it was being offered for considerably more, into the £100s.
- Her group of friends, who are from a variety of schools round the country heard very little from peers about it before the exam. A few had friends who'd seen the blacked out papers, no one they knew claimed to have seen the whole paper.
6.The non-blacked out papers only became widely on the internet after the exam. They haven't found any signs of the non-blacked out ones before the exam being generally available.
- Enough was blacked out of the questions that you really couldn't use the questions without the full thing. They don't feel that the mechanics question would have had any benefit in being seen blacked out, and the statistics one, only minor advantage, perhaps a couple of marks.
- Once the exam is started, apparently they can't resit it. They can call it off right up until it starts, but once it's started it can't be stopped.
- Edexcel seem to have found the source of the leak (South London, I think was what she said). What they've done in previous similar cases is take out the local schools, or any where there is evidence the leak might have travelled to, when they're setting grade boundaries. So if there are a number of schools where the results may be higher, then it doesn't effect the grade boundaries. Obviously that means some cheats may have gained grades, but it also means others shouldn't miss out.
My thoughts from this. How many A-level maths students would be on the internet at 10/10:30pm on the evening before the exam? Not many, I'd reckon. So the majority who get the exam would not get it until say 8am the next morning. They've then got only 4-5 hours to either work through the paper, or find someone whose morals won't send them straight to report it to work it for them. Teachers would have to report it.
They've then got to memorise the answers. I wouldn't fancy doing that and getting it right, would you? It was a 2.5 hour (?) paper. So they need to find someone that can do it in 2.5 hours get it back to them, and then they've got 2.5 hours to memorise it.
I'd reckon that probably anyone who did it that way would make mistakes that would make it really obvious that they'd done that too, leaving gaps out or misremembering answers.
I agree that it's not likely enough students did that to make a difference.