Error in mock maths exam question

[YesYesKitten]

DD came out of her Y11 GCSE maths mock last month saying that a question asked for the value of Q but there wasn't a Q in the question.

When she got her paper back, the teacher said there was a printing error, and there was no Q.

Obviously such mistakes happen but how are internal papers put together and checked these days???

They're put together by teachers and checked by teachers. Teachers are humans working under high pressure.

They are obviously not checked to anything like the level of real exams, but even real exams have had occasional errors.

Grade boundaries are movable so can adjust to take account of the error.

This is a great teaching moment for your child - she knows roughly how many minutes she should spend per mark, never waste time on a question that doesn't make sense, keep going and return later if possible.

Our real exam had 3 errors in it last year. I forgot one of them and it went in the mock exam because I am trying to do a million jobs at once and I didn't spot it till I looked at the mark scheme. Would you like me to be sacked? I would quite enjoy that after the last fortnight!

Wow yes they are put together by those human beings, teachers. There’s not any kind of national checking system! It’s a shame there was a mistake but I agree, your dd can learn from this that mistakes are possible. If you think there is an error in an exam you can query it with the invigilator who may have an erratum list.

A few years ago the OCR R&J question asked why Tybalt hated the Capulets! What a mare. Thank goodness DD sat AQA as that would have totally thrown her. I believe the board marked the answers where students had tried to answer the question, and also those who boldly said “I think you mean Montagues” and answered that. Not great tho. This one in a mock is neither here nor there OP.

I had a uni exam in my final year during the winter. Started doing the first question, saw it had the answer on it, so figured we were just meant to show our working. 2nd question, same issue. People are starting to look through their papers at this point and eventually someone sticks their hand up and points out to the adjudicator that we've been given the marking paper.

They tell us to bugger off and come back in two hours when they'll have it sorted. We obviously bugger off to the pub. Come back two hours later and we're given a choice, either do a paper now or in the summer. Given that we're all rather tipsy we unanimously decide to go for the summer.

Mistakes happen, even with the best will in the world.

Most mocks will be past papers, or made up of past paper questions. I will hold my hands up and say a few years ago I gave a class a mock which had an arguable error in the question (it wasn't as bad as Q vs no Q). It was last year's past paper, which is standard for mocks in my school, so I, as an individual class teacher didn't check it, and apparently neither did my HoD!

Only after marking and some of my students querying the question did we agree it as a potential error/point of confusion, and when we used the paper again (for a different year group, obviously), we did redact that question.

I would say it's the HoD's responsibility to check the paper if it's a year group wide mock, however, the questions may have come from the exam board like that. Exam boards do make errors (obviously that's far from ideal, and I really think they shouldn't), but your DD should have a strategy for this e.g. in the Q/no Q question, I would move on, leave it until last and come back to it.

In errors like the one for my group, I would suggest following the numerical values given, rather than going with the text.