Senior School SECO advice - laptop for A2

[goinggetstough]

My DS has permission to type his A2 exams and has completed all the relevant paperwork etc. He has complained often that the programme they have to use for exams is difficult to use in an exam situation because he doesn't know how much he has written. I have queried this with the school and they say the exam boards state they must use the "word pad" programme and this has no word count and it can't be added. If this is correct (is there a link?) does anyone have any strategies for getting round the problem that they have taught their students.

(have posted this in senior education section too)

Surely other students who are writing their exams wouldn't know the word count either though? Am I missing the point?

All the way back in the day of my exams I knew that my writing was approx 15 words per line, so I always knew roughly how many lines to do. Is that something your son could consider?

Yes, of course he doesn't need the exact number but as I understand it they can't see the page either, at least as a whole page, just continuous writing with paragraph breaks. Whereas if you are writing it you turn the page over etc and thus know how much you have written.

It depends on why he is using a laptop - they are using word pafd because it doesn't have all the functions of word.

He might not be able to count words but he can number each paragraph or line and then 'unnumber' them.

He can also 'print oreview' to see the number of sheets he has written.

I give my students a chance in lesson to type up their best answers to an exam paper in word, then copy and paste into wordpad so that they can see how much of the page they are aiming for. It's quite time consuming so at A2 perhaps this is something he could do independently on a home computer. It's inexact, but that doesn't matter. From a marker's point of view, the important thing is to leave a line space between paragraphs as the text is very dense and can be difficult to annotate.

Thank you for all your help.