Pronouns in maths exams

[OhWhatFuckeryIsThisNow]

I scribe for GCSEs. Today was aqa maths, calculator paper. Now maths textbooks and exams have long done diverse names in the examples, eg, Sarah and Rashid are making cakes...Dafydd is planting a garden, Safira is buying rope. You get the drift. This year though I’ve noticed that gender neutral has been introduced. So Kai is making a cake, they use 50 grams of sugar. One could say that making the questions genderless is ok, and maybe so if it was consistent. So there was they their, he him and she her. A few of my fellow sribers said that their candidates were confused by the wording of the questions (especially the they/theirs, the kids thought there were more than one person being talked about). I was talking about it with the maths teachers later and all of them said why can’t it be Student A, student B? And especially why cant the exam board be consistent?

This is the problem with being guided by diversity experts who are unable to see the bigger picture or any world outside their own little bubble.

Prediction. As a result of AQA's new commitment to 'diversity' (but not the disability kind), the board will release new, updated editions of all the textbooks across AQA subjects!

Schools will be told they will have to buy these in order to adequately prepare for the new question formats!

slightly off topic - if you have a child with visual difficulties such as colour blindness make sure the school and exams officer know. Invigilators are allowed to name colours in these cases - so if the question is “which is the country shown in yellow” we would be allowed to point at it.

ideally they should be in stripes/spots or whatever though not colours. If a question is absolutely dependent on colour vision the exam board should make adjustments…but you have to make sure these issues are raised before exams!

Many thanks @DorotheaDiamond
I always let teachers know, but I had not thought of exams officers.

Another carefully checked exam, GCSE Edexcel Geography labelling the wrong countries on a map.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/map-of-african-countries-labelled-incorrectly-on-gcse-geography-exam-paper-cp3nwcw9v

It makes you wonder how many errors the boards make that don't get reported on, because in those cases, it is possible for exam board staff to mean-spiritedly argue the toss about whether the questions were unclear for candidates.

By and large, we only hear about open-and-shut case like confusing the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet and mislabeling flipping countries, as no-one's found a way to say that objecting to such a thing is transphobic or somehow the fault of poor teaching. Give it time though.

extract
[...] the map wrongly labelled Gabon as the Republic of the Congo as part of an extended question about countries on the continent that produce oil.

A secondary school geography teacher feared the mistake by the Pearson Edexcel exam board, in the last of three papers sat on Tuesday, could damage pupils’ results.

He told MailOnline: “Thousands of kids across England and Wales sat that. There have been a lot of complaints to the exam board. They have been inundated. It’s an atrocious mistake from an exam body setting GCSE papers. They have been rubbish in all three papers this year, but this is by far the worst mistake. [bold mine]

I wonder what the Maths examiners would make of an English exam that contained incorrect maths.

Purgatory I think someone needs to write to the Times to point out that would never happen, as the papers are carefully checked.

I think more mistakes are being spotted than there used to be due to social media. When I did exams back in the olden days, you'd come out and chat about it with your friends, and maybe complain at your teacher, but that would be about as far as it went.
Now everybody tags AQA on Twitter.
This is not a bad thing as it holds them more accountable.
The exam boards get lots and lots of money. You'd think the least they could do is get stuff right - the wrong countries in a Geography exam is a pretty big mistake, isn't it.

I think the worst mistake so far this year is that WJEC forgot to include the Shakespeare questions on the A-level lit paper so kids thought they had been taught the wrong texts and then had to wait ages for the extra questions to be printed and distributed.

Shocking

How in the name of the wee man could an error as big as that get through! That is horrifying.

AQA having a truly stunning exam season schoolsweek.co.uk/aqa-sorry-for-stress-over-a-level-law-questions-not-in-advance-info/ Another fuck-up, another apology.

Yay. My year 11 has two more science exams to go and now doesn't know whether he can trust the advanced info or not. It was supposed to help but hasn't.

Nah.

This Never Happens. Multiple people check those questions, you know.