Cheating in GCSE exams - how common?

[Pissedoffatschool]

I have name changed because I have mentioned DD's school in previous posts.

Dd sat 2 GCSEs early in year 9 last summer, this is school policy. Yesterday she mentioned that in her Spanish written exam there were people with their notes next to them on their chairs, floor etc. This came up because we got the school newsletter and 2 kids had got A* for both GCSEs. She said she was one of the few who didn't cheat in that exam. She did admit though that the teacher did give her a bit too much "help" in the oral exam.

The teacher has since retired but was renowned for the number of As her class received. I feel sick at this. I know in my other child's school they err on the side of caution and are incredibly strict in all exams and assessments. I don't know if it is a maverick teacher or if this is widespread in the school. Has anyone come across it?

I don't feel I can complain because it might affect all the results but I am really annoyed.

In language exams at my school, you had to wrote an essay you already knew the title of, but write the avtual piece under exam conditions - so basically rope learning spellings etc. It was done in the classroom as coursework, and most of the class cheated!

*write

I know a kid who cheated (kept on writing after time was up).

In language exams at my school (we did French, German and English- I lived abroad), when we were 14, we sat the scariest exam (I guess as a kind of warning for the actual important tests- but this was way harder). They gave you a piece of news- usually gory and two witness accounts. You then had an hour to come up with a) another witness account from a different perspective, b) a news article on the side of the 'bad person' and c) two German rhyming poems of twenty lines each.

This was repeated in the French test, and in the English test. We were marked as if we were doing it in our native language. For my German test, I was given the story of a kidnapping of two little children (-a fake story) and in French, it was the story of a bomb exploding on a boat. Fun.

I've always found the part of language exams where you were allowed to take in a dictionary strange - particularly as the dictionaries we were "recommended" at school all had example sentences for most of the words. This made my attempt of "write a postcard home in German from your holiday visiting German friends" a lot easier, if a bit odd content-wise.

Then again, it probably balanced nicely with my crap listening exam. I spoke to some friends afterwards about my (wild) guess of "what was the topic of the television show" as ''a man rescuing a princess from werewolves in the castle' and they were rather

Our speaking exam was a 10 minute speech about a topic chosen by us, which could be pre written and checked by our teacher - so all of it could be memorised. 16 years (ouch) later I still remember chunks of it.

Year 10 dd came home very indignant from her English descriptive writing controlled assessment because the girl next to her had her phone out and was copying from it. Teacher was at front of the room oblivious because marking scripts. Dd told the girl quite fiercely to put the phone away; other girl blushed and complied, fortunately. Quite clearly anything could have been going on in that room.

My french GCSE was rather confused when we were asked to write our essay on " A family row".
Half the class wrote about an argument between brothers and sisters, the other half about a trip to the local boating park!

Our German GCSE in the mid 1990s had a memorised component to the oral exam. There were 7 possible topics, and 5 questions within each topic. We spent weeks in class writing our answers, revising them to include more complicated vocab and grammar to get the maximum possible marks, and memorising them.

Shame we still had the listening, reading and writing to do, really.

Lainie, schools are no longer doing numerous resits because only the first attempt counts now. In DD2's school there are some kids who are not academic and they do seem to be successful on the second or third attempt to scrape a bare pass - as English and maths GCSE are essential for most jobs, I think that is quite reasonable. This also involves extra lessons in the evenings and at weekends, provided by the school, to get them through.

Personally I think there is nothing wrong with modular exams. DD2 is dyslexic and cannot memorise parrot fashion for terminal exams. DD1 on the other hand did fuck all work and came out with mainly A* because she has an exceptional memory. Ironically her lowest grades - still As - were in two modular exams - French and History - her school only allowed one attempt at each component.

By the way DD1's French is better than mine ever was. So perhaps the GCSE is more effective. I can remember a lot of irregular verb endings though in a variety of tenses!

I took 'O' Levels and I remember a girl in my year who was caught cheating.

She'd submitted a shop-made dress with the labels cut out for her Needlework coursework. She had every one of her 'O' level exams cancelled and the school expelled her.

I remember being quite shocked, although we'd all been well warned what would happen to anyone caught cheating. I suppose I'd always thought cheating meant looking up answers. It seemed draconian to wreck her whole exam over needlework, but then I hated needlework and dropped it at the first opportunity I got :)