Error on English literature GCSE paper

[indaba]

Listening to news just now one of the education boards has had to apologise for making a mistake on the English Lit GCSE paper. Mistaken identity of families in Romeo & Juliet. Fundamental error. How does this happen? I am so annoyed for the poor children. It was decided two years ago that R&J was on this years syllabus.....they have had two years to get this right! Really appalling. Ok, no one died but really! Feel better for off loading that.

DS just read out this news story to me. He's doing A levels - says if that had happened in his GCSE exam he'd have been so disconcerted that he'd likely have fucked up the whole exam.

It's a weird error as well.

Oh hang on ... Denise is taking her Eng Lit GCSE today on Eastenders. She's smiling. She hasn't spotted the error.

There are two. Romeo and Juliet was on Monday.

What will the exam board do?

OCR did Romeo and Juliet today- and made the very silly mistake. AQA did R&J on Monday and paper 2 lit today.
Luckily our school do AQA as that mistake must have thrown so many students.

I heard a spokesperson say that it wouldn't affect the children's grades. How on earth can they say that? Every kid would have spent ages trying to figure out if they were wrong or the paper was. How do you decide how many extra marks you award for that?

FFS. Of course it will affect grades. How stupid can they be?!

What is the protocol if a teacher spots the error? I presume they aren't allowed to point it out to the assembled children?

Do they not issue corrections when errors are spotted?

In Ireland, if a potential error like this is spotted, the student is told to tell the invigilator who can then contact the State Exams Commission. If it is an error, a text message goes out to all schools' exam co-ordinators who pass the message on to the invigilators. Takes about 30 minutes max from experience.

It's a long time since I took GCSEs Sally but I don't think the teachers get sight of the papers in advance - they open the envelope at exactly the same time in every school around the country.

and now I am going to rant further.....listening to news headlines on Radio 4.....head teacher interviewed... said the incorrect question was worth 25% of the papers marks!!!

It's the same here Jiggly, everyone gets the paper at the same time and there could be 30,000 taking the same paper.

It still works - I've been invigilating for 10+ years and we either get an erratum from the proof-readers on a separate booklet or a text to the school (followed up by an email) if it's not spotted until the exam has started.

They will do lots of standardisation calculations tmake sure candidtes are fairly compensated

Yes I get that but the issue is some kids will cope differently. Some will freak out there is an incomprehensible question. Others won't notice. It's ridiculous. Someone should do Thor job properly.