AQA lost my exam paper

[Naem]

My DS (Year 11) has been told this story by somebody he knows who is now in in Year 12, and DS clearly believes it. DH and I have said to DS that we are having a great deal of difficulty believing the truth of the story, so I wondered what those more experienced with the GCSE boards, and AQA in particular, thought.
The story goes that AQA lost the English papers that this boy sat for his GCSEs last year, that the boy didn't know until he asked for a re-mark, only to be told that his exam papers had been lost because they were sent (by post!) to some examiner who had recently moved but had not redirected her post, and so they have never shown up.
Apparently therefore, AQA had to make up a mark, so they based it on what the boy had received for his mocks, which apparently the boy was annoyed about because he had only started working after his mocks. Apparently not only did they take the grade from the mocks, but they then lowered it a grade.
DS had told me this story before, although not quite in so much detail, but it has come up again now that DS is facing his own mocks, as he used the story to justify why instead of using the mocks to establish what one does or does not know, it is legitimate to panic, because apparently it might, if the board lost the exam paper, be used as the basis to calculate one's grade! He has also been told by this boy that in fact the boards lose lots of exam papers each year.
Please can some of those out there who know the inner workings of the GCSE boards, particularly AQA, tell me whether in fact boards do lose exam papers, in what kinds of numbers, and what they really do if this happens so as not to penalise students.

This is bollocks.

AQA scan in papers and they're marked online by examiners.

There's therefore a tallying up of papers Vs candidates supplemented by school recorded of no shows etc.

Each candidate has their own numbers allocated. At the end of exams the papers are all collated in order and couriered to exam boards.

It's be very unusual indeed for it to vanish.

Oh, I have so many questions starting with how would the exam board know the mark from the mock seeing as that is internally marked?

We had a presentation in school by someone who worked for one of the exam boards, he said that the papers were scanned and marked on line, examiners would be sent selected questions and wouldn't see a whole paper from one candidate.

If you miss an exam for a valid reason you can apply for special consideration and the missing mark can be estimated. Surprise, suprise, AQA do not base it on the mock (which they don't know) but on the other exams that you did take in that session:

"In these cases, a mark is calculated for the missing unit provided the student has completed enough of the specification to meet the minimum requirements specified by JCQ. The calculation of the missing mark takes into account the student's performance in the other comparable units of the exam and the national average for those units. This method is considered to be fair and consistent."

If we suspend parental disbelief and accept that an exam paper vanished without being scanned then the missing mark could be estimated but it wouldn't be based on the mock exam. I can't believe that one child could be so unlucky as to have two papers lost from two separate days. What are the chances of both his papers going to the same examiner even if they did go in paper rather than electronically?

Is the friend having to retake it in Y12, maybe feeling a bit embarrassed about it, maybe wanting it to be somebody else's fault?

The point about "how would AQA know about the mock grade?" is exactly what I said to DS. He said maybe the school released it. I said that as the mock result was his data, I wouldn't have thought the school could release it without the boy's consent, given that this is unusual. I also said I couldn't see the school releasing it if it is going to make the grade go down, rather than up.
Ds's explanation (presumably from the boy) for why there were two papers together also doesn't make a lot of sense to me - apparently the boy was allowed to use a laptop and it was then printed out, and that meant it wasn't scanned, or something strange like that. I can try and clarify.
Of course, if it is just people who are allowed to use laptops, then DS doesn't qualify, so at least I can reassure him that his exam script, being normal, will be scanned in the normal way and sent electronically.
I also suspect this is a story to cover for a bad grade, but DS is struggling to see this, and I wanted as many hard facts as I could produce.

Hmmm. I had ds' AQA English language papers back to prepare for retakes, and have seen them with my own eyes. They were indeed scanned, but they were scanned post marking and the marking was in red pen and handwriting - it was not computerised. This was the case for both papers, each marked in red pen, by two different people (different handwriting on paper 1 than 2).

To my surprise there were comments like in his books eg "close response to question" and "high quality vocab but insufficiently developed for x mark"

So ds' AQA English from 2018 was NOT marked online.

No idea if this gives any credence to your son's friend's story, but if it makes him work for mocks....!

...and my DS does use a laptop. So that bit of the story makes sense!

The boy couldn't request a remark if he didn't know the results of the original paper 🤔

I've online marked scripts that were produced on laptop. My exam board (not AQA) routinely scans them in & has done since 2013. Paper scripts are quite rare nowadays.

Yup. Examiner for AQA here. Not English, but I've only ever marked online....

The boy couldn't request a remark if he didn't know the results of the original paper
According to the story told to DS, the mark was somehow "made up" from the boy's mock, without him knowing, and that was what appeared as his grade in August when he got his results. It was only when the boy put in for a remark, apparently, was he told that in fact his paper had been lost and an alternative grade substituted, so no remark was possible.

No idea if this gives any credence to your son's friend's story, but if it makes him work for mocks....!
At the moment the concern regarding DS is not that he is not working, but that he might burn himself out too early.
Also he wants not to have to go to school for a compulsory couple of periods (not related to any of the subjects in is mocks) on the mornings of his mocks, and is trying to persuade me why his mocks are so desperately important that all of the rest of life should come to a halt. Hence the regurgitation of this story, which he had told me earlier in the year, in a more "how unjust this is" type way, and without me probing too deeply.

AQA do send papers out to senior examiners when they can't be marked online but these are print outs as all papers are scanned and not the original papers. they are marked in red and returned to AQA but the marks are sent electronically.

I used to work for an exam board during the summer holidays (when I was at university - so late 1990s). There were always a number of papers that went AWOL (despite our best efforts to track them down).

I worked in the section that dealt with science papers - very occasionally a student would end up with a mark based off the papers we had received (there were always multiple papers sat). It wasn’t terribly common though.

If he believes it then there is really no point in pointing out all the flaws in the story. I would go with smiling and nodding and telling him that what happened to someone else has very little to do with him.

My geography coursework was sent off for external examination (in the dark ages, before scanning I expect) and it got lost in the post. But they accepted my internal marking result.

A paper missing, and the mark based solely on the other papers = very unlikely (but just about plausible)

All papers missing, and the marked based on the mock = not possible.

In N Ireland about 20 years ago a van load of A level papers were lost when the van was hijacked and set fire to during a particularly contentious summer of rioting. This thread just made it pop back into my mind and out of curiosity I have been googling frantically trying to find out how the issue was resolved. It was widely reported on at the time. But I can't find anything. I know they did come up with some solution I just don't know what it was...

If the other boy did his exam using a laptop then it would also be saved electronically so if the print copy were lost in the post the electronic copy would still exist. (I am an exam invigilator)

If the other boy did his exam using a laptop then it would also be saved electronically
I also said that, and DS said they were not allowed to save them electronically, and the laptops were handed back, (that bit did make sense to me, as if it was his own laptop, then how can you make sure there isn't software on the laptop that can unduly assist?, even spell check is presumably disabled).
We then did get into a discussion as to whether one could retrieve the information off a laptop even if it wasn't saved, but DH (an IT specialist) said not necessarily, and here presumably we were talking about numbers of possible laptops that may have been used by other students for other exams, making it very difficult to track the right one.

At my school the work is always saved and then printed. It is one of my jobs to make sure this is done. It isn't saved to the laptop itself, the pupil is given a login just for the exam.

Exams officer here - students who wordprocess have to print off 2 copies of their work (and sign every page). One copy is kept in secure storage in the school so if the board mislay the original they can ask for it (they did for a paper for one student at our school this summer).

If a board thinks they have mislaid a handwritten paper, they contact us and ask for our copies of the seating plans and registers and usually do resolve things or find the paper.

Blankety ..ahh! That will explain why he had signed each page (badly!)

My entire year at a large sixth form college had to retake a general studies exam as the papers went awol. That was almost 20 years ago though, when exam papers were still all physically sent to examiners. Nobody was particularly stressed as it was first year of sixth form and only general studies. It was more annoying than stressful!

So I would believe it’s possible for papers to go missing. I find it hard to believe that they gave a grade based on internal mock exams and that nobody was aware of this until the remark was requested. The exam board wouldn’t even know the marks for the mock without asking the school!

I’m a teacher - as others say I’ve once had a paper going missing (the mark was averaged from the other paper + coursework - this was 4 years ago now) and last year had a technology error that meant the examiner marking the girl’s paper only received half of it (again, once we realised one of our brightest students had almost certainly not got a D in her best paper we paid for remark and they realised the error, so the missing esaay’s mark was averaged from the rest of the paper I believe). Only one of these was AQA and I’ve been teaching (on and off) for 20 years now and always have at least 60-90 GCSE taking students among my classes as I only teach year 10 and 11... it’s not a common occurrence.

Actually about 10 years ago I did send a request in for remark and was told said paper had gone missing between the original marking and the remarking. I’m skeptical - I think they realised they’d got it so outlandishly wrong (one of those most brilliant kids I ever taught) and didn’t want to admit so conveniently lost it. But I’m just suspicious and negative towards exam boards, plus it was a LONG time ago

I mark for aqa and only online

I've marked English recently and there were sometimes random papers floating around the postal system weeks after the exams due to examiners not finishing in time, pulling out etc. A paper I had marked once went missing on its way back to the exam board and they phoned me to check what grade I had given even though I had entered it on the online system. It's definitely not foolproof!
That wasn't AQA though.