Help from an exams officer/teacher please-urgently needed.

[KellySeveride]

DC3 has just received his English Language scripts back following a surprise grade 2 in his GCSE’s. He sat his exams on a laptop because he has incredibly poor handwriting. The teacher/adjudicator on the day of paper 2 has failed to attach his answers to the paper so he has received no marks for this paper.

What are our next steps, will the school have a copy of his answers (school provided the laptop used in the exam)? Will it be remarked?

This is a huge fuck up and is possibly changing his trajectory for next steps so I’m trying to understand what happens whilst I wait for the teachers at the school to reply.

I have added pictures of the marking scheme and his annotations to show he was planning an answer. The 4 marks are for the multiple choice which he did on the actual paper itself.

Poor kid. Something has clearly gone awry here.

There's really nothing you can do at the moment apart from contacting the exams officer and getting them on with trying to sort it out from their end.

Like I've said, there will be systems in place for dealing with this sort of thing.

hi! what a nightmare
i can't help as I'm just a parent but wanted to check the system in your school.
After my son's GCSE exams (each paper) he had to go to the exams office and print all the scripts himself, not sure who then attached to his papers. Obviously this was with the exams officer present, Worth checking the system used.
Good Luck!

This exact same thing happened to my daughter. In her English language paper
The work done on the laptop wasn't marked and she got a 2.

The school dealt with it all (and v quickly) so I am not entirely sure the procedure but I am assuming they had a copy of her work which was sent off to be remarked and her grade was changed to a 5.

We were lucky (I suppose) that the school immediately identified that she should not have got a 2 and jumped on getting it sorted.

She is still bitter about her results day because it was a sad and stressful day (she had to do an extra test at college registration to see if she could still do her course) while all her friends were celebrating. She was predicted 4s in Lang and Lit and was convinced she had failed lit - she got a 5 in both (eventually) which was a huge cause for celebrating and it's a shame she didn't get that on the results day.

I hope you get it sorted, it's hard enough for our SEN kids without these extra fuck ups!

This happened to my DC a couple of years ago. The School lost his exam paper and reported it to the exam board and it was agreed that they would take the average of his other papers for a mark and he got the mark that was expected or slightly lower than expected. If the school cannot find the paper they will need to contact the exam board asking for mitigating circumstances and get a quick remark which the exam board should do. If you DC is better at the exam that has the paper missing make sure that you indicate that. In our case the exam papers were separated into different skills and my DC was better at the skills tested in the paper that went missing.

For anyone whose DC is taking exams on a laptop please be aware that it is not as easy as them just having a laptop. In order to prepare them to type as fast as possible with a laptop they need to be doing all their work in the preceding two years on the laptop and the School needs to ensure that there is a place for them to save their work at the end of each lesson which they can then either print out and put in their book or save Online to be able to access to do their revision at the end of two years. Some schools are not really good about this and I think it’s really important to be aware of that especially if you have a child with sen who good might not be as organised with their paperwork.

Second thing is that although the exam boards say that exam papers should be printed after the exam and signed by the candidate schools find this quite hard to do. Often they are not responsible for these arrangements but the invigilator is in partnership with IT in the school.

The second problem is that often people who do exams on laptops are in smaller separate rooms and they may be running several different exams at the same time. This makes it difficult to print out and get a candidate to sign a paper if other people are still taking the exam and if you have 15 candidates for example who are using a laptop and finish at the same time then the invigilator has to print out 15 copies and get 15 people to sign them. Sometimes this is not possible if a candidate has to go straight to another exam or they have to go to lunch in order to have a break before they have their other exam also if the candidate with a laptop finishes early then the invigilators will be busy with the other candidates who are still taking their exam and won’t want to make a noise.

Each School should have an exams officer who should be setting these arrangements up before the exam so if your child is doing an exam on laptop it’s best to make sure that you coordinate with the exams officer before the exams start so that you understand and your child understands the arrangements for the exams.

In our case the exam paper was completely lost on the IT system and never recovered. Nobody understands why because there wasn’t a trail straight after the exam and therefore when they went back to printed out they couldn’t find it. It may have been that my child was not aware of how to save it properly and it wasn’t checked at the time.

good luck with finding a solution.

Have you ever invigilated an exam in a mixed ability school. Rare but it does happen that people don’t write anything.
Also we are not allowed to tell a pupil to write. That is prompting and only allowed if a SEN regulation.
We can do the odd welfare check to they haven’t passed out or mean to be asleep.
An invigilator might write on the log sheet that x has done nothing, but we can’t tell them to.

I mentioned this to my daughter who took her gcse this year in a smaller room. Some children were using laptops. She wondered if he didn't save his answers. It seems a few children didn't during mocks, even when directed to. One child at least didn't during his actual paper too. She didn't think this was on purpose, just nerves and haste.

Anything done on a laptop/pc is printed out and kept. Speak to school ASAP. I oversee exams for children who have an adjustment like your child

Yes. We always do an incident report. E. G
Jimmy had his head on the desk

Do you have actual experience with this? It just doesn't sound like you do.

When using a word processor in an exam they get the normal paper exam paper that the other pupils get. They type their answers onto a blank word processor document. Their answers are not typed into the official exam paper. So it is completely possible that this child HAS answered the questions but there has been a failure afterwards such as: failing to save it; failure to print it; failure to print and attach it to the script with a treasury tag; printing has come apart after the papers have been sent back to the exam board.

Go on the JCQ website. You can find all the regulations that schools must follow.
ICE Instructions for conducting Exams and AA Access Arrangements.

Exams Officer here. If it’s English Language are you relying on the grade to get into 6th form/similar or for a specific subject? If so, pursue this urgently by emailing exams officer, year head, subject teacher and SLT responsible for SEN. As results have only just been issued I’d expect at least one of those staff to be keeping an eye on their emails.

It sounds like the print out has gone missing. The Exams Office are allowed to keep a copy of typed scripts so you may be lucky there. It is a JCQ rule that students must be present when the typed script is printed. Also, the typed script should have the students, school & paper details on the top (I number the pages and the student initials each page as they are checking them), was your son present for printing? I also make my students watch me put the print outs inside the answer/question book. Can he remember anything like that?

He may not have saved his work; I’d expect the EO/invigilator to check when it’s printed (good practice is to leave a student’s work on the laptop screen until it is known to have been printed out). What is the school’s practice?

If the script has genuinely been lost by the school or exam board, the exam board will be able to calculate a mark of the lost paper based on the present paper. Look up JCQ Z score calculation. Good luck.

Hi op

I am an EO. Each school does it differently but in this scenario I would be asking if the EO has kept an online copy of the script. We do this. We keep it on the USb stick and we keep a copy in a folder in the exams office. I would be able to show the audit with the date of completion etc.

It is possible it has got lost at the exam board stage when they scan the papers.

Also as well as EO copy in the head of centre or academic head.

Our EO has them print out in front of her. One copy is attached to the paper, the other copy is put in an envelope which is sealed and the candidate signs across the seal and this is then kept in the exams locked cage room (so many locks!). In the worst case scenario and if there is no log that your son was asleep, did nothing, etc, then the exam board will award a mark based on the paper already completed. It is sortable and term starts next week so it will be doable. If he is going on to college then email your schools HOY and poss the Deputy head of Academic to ask them to intercede with the college and give mock results, etc.

good luck and it can be sorted but it would be helpful if your son can confirm that he did answer this paper and didn’t fall asleep before you go to all this hoo haa.

I have plenty of experience of this.

At no point did I say that the answers are typed into the paper.

the exam board we used for eng/eng lit required all answer in separate answer booklet. So it never have such situation. Also Exam board will contact us in July to check if there is missing script.

My school will keep all typed scripts until Nov.

I am so sorry to hear you have such a bad experience.

@SwanHK not if the candidate has typed, it will be on printed paper.

But you are correct, EOs are obliged to keep copies of typed answers until the end of the review of marking period. Which can be around late Sept/into Oct depending on outstanding RORs

Update:

The school finally contacted me at 4.10pm to say they have retrieved DC’s answers and are sending it to AQA for priority marking.

Followed by the most measly apology I have ever received in my life!

So this answers the people who were asking about the process-it’s clear they did keep a copy of DC’s answers as they were supposed to.

I am so angry at the school right now and will be requesting a debrief meeting.

That’s great.
It might not have been them that lost it unless they admitted they did, so see what they say first.

At least they kept a copy and can now all be sorted.

That's excellent news that they've acted so quickly. I'd anticipate the results being with you fairly quickly now.

I'm quite surprised that no one spotted that there were missing marks on results day.

They should now report themselves for maladministration.

The measly apology I received indicates this was a school error.

If it was not their error they’d be explaining what had happened.

You’ve been so helpful on this thread. Could you explain briefly the process regarding reporting themselves please? Because it’s something I will ask in the debrief meeting.

Big relief they've found the paper! But what an error.
Hope your DS is ok.

Be aware that schools may (not must) keep copies of typed work..there’s no guarantee that they will (not for OP for others reading this). It’s not that unusual for the exam board to lose papers whether they are typed or not…there’s only thing the school/invigilators need to do is make sure a paper is submitted for each candidate - every school will check those carefully - the exam board also checks the number of papers received matches the number of candidates present. But there are no required checks for typed papers as the exam board has no record of who types in svance - and some kids do t always type,

longwinded preamble to…if your kids are typing tell them to write on the exam paper/answer book “answer typed” or equivalent. Then the examiner will know to look for typed work and if it’s missing it will be queried much earlier. I invigilate and I tell all my typists to do that - they are actually allowed to do that (supervised) after the end of the exam if needed.

while I’m at it… schools DO NOT have to provide auto save for their work…there’s student is 100% responsible for saving their own work. If they haven’t and the computer dies the answer will be “tough”… if they haven’t and it dies and is irretrievable then it’s handled differently (thankfully never seen that)…tell them to save after every answer (or paragraph).

They should complete the centre maladministration form which they get from the JCQ website.

It's a pretty major fuckup - although I imagine in reality it will just mean the inspection next year is more thorough.

Out of interest, did your son have to sign the work as it was printed?

The best examples I've seen - and I see a lot - have all the candidate info on every page, a signature on every page, and a handwritten page x of y on every page. So I can very clearly see if something is missing. Although not if the whole lot is missing!