It was revealed recently that pupils sitting a GCSE Music exam were surprised when they found the answers to some of the questions printed on the back of the paper. To me, the shock there is that they were surprised.
News of mistakes in school and university exam papers is becoming worryingly common. Obviously, it’s still a small percentage of exams that are condemned to a question-setter with a bad memory/limited intelligence/a strange sense of humour, and certainly, many people would argue that no one is infallible, everyone is entitled to the odd cock-up once in a while and the following column is all a big fuss over nothing. But you can equally argue that in some disciplines you just can’t afford to make mistakes. I, for one, would argue that.
Surgeons, condom-makers and people in charge of the red button are just a few examples that spring to mind, and while the faceless anonymities who set exam papers perhaps don’t seem as important, it is important they do their job properly.
But what if they don’t? This time, a GCSE Music paper has a copyright statement on the back revealing the answers to several questions. In the past, it’s been impossible answers in a non-calculator Maths exam, a poem with missing lines in a GCSE English paper and Shakespeare and Chaucer being replaced by Winehouse and Dylan in a Cambridge University English exam (actually, that was this week and it was intentional).
Cardiff University medical students, in particular, must get so frustrated with shambolic exam papers that the temptation must be there to treat them as the joke they often are (see illustrations). Last year saw a triple-whammy of incompetence: one collection of students had to abandon their Health in Society exam while students in other rooms continued (1), after last-minute photocopying (2) produced question papers showing the answers (3). The year before, four consecutive final-year exams featured significant errors, including – brilliantly – no space in which to write answers. The students were so accustomed to mistakes that they laughed when the invigilators announced them.
Mistakes keep happening across the board(s). But should all the students affected resit the offending papers?
In short, yes. “That’s not fair,” people cry, “I did really well the first time round. Now you’re saying that just because a few questions were messed up, I have to do the whole thing again? What if I don’t do as well?” But as unfair as that may sound, it’s not as unfair as subjecting an entire set of marks to approximation – which is effectively what ignoring the mistakes does. In the aforementioned GCSE Music exam, some students just copied down the correct answer provided while others worried that putting the right answer, even if they already knew it, would look like cheating. You can’t take those answers seriously. The whole exam becomes meaningless.
And yes, you can arrange resits. Yes, you – no – no, shut up – you – shut up – yes, you can. Sorry for the insistence, but I’m anticipating the same “You can’t just arrange another exam” response as I get from many people. Administration is only a bitch if you let it be a bitch, and the fact is that if an exam is important enough, you can schedule it. After all, a re-take would happily be arranged if nobody took the exam (due to illness, say, or a bomb scare). The same should apply if a flawed exam paper jeopardises results.
Now, you might question why I’m raising this issue now, and why I’m apparently so keen to stick the boot in. The reason is I’m concerned about the increasingly blasé attitude exam boards are adopting towards error-strewn exam papers. OCR defended the GCSE Music cock-up by saying, “It is unlikely that any of the 12,000 students sitting the examination would have recognised the value of the information in the copyright statement and subsequently used it.”
Well, there’s confidence for you.
Not only is OCR making a sad indictment on students’ intelligence, it is casually dismissing the facts. This statement was made after it was already clear that students HAD “recognised the value of the information in the copyright statement” – which, by the way, literally revealed the answer; there was no interpretation involved – and makes no attempt to take responsibility or even apologise.
There is no excuse for releasing a school or university exam paper with typos, let alone unanswerable questions, no space to answer the unanswerable questions or the impossible answers to the unanswerable questions printed on the question paper (or all three). And yet exam boards seem happy to do so, when all that’s needed is one quick proofread.
If it’s so hard, students should be tested by setting an exam, not sitting it. I don’t know if question-setters are assessed in any related way before embarking on their careers, but you’d like to think they’re asked, “If you’re testing a student’s knowledge on a subject, should the student be told the answer to a question?”
“Ah shit, I know this one…it’s yes, isn’t it?”
There are, perhaps, bigger questions. Are exams at university level even wise? Requiring greater research and more realistic time management, coursework and research projects are more suited to testing a person’s aptitude for a career than exams, which essentially just test your memory. Coursework is arguably less susceptible to idiotic question-setters, too. But that’s another (better) column.
So, in the spirit of responsibility and benevolence, I advise you not to worry yourself into a state about passing your exam.
And in the spirit of irresponsibility and malevolence, I’ll say you should worry about having an exam to pass, and not a slab of meat left on your desk with a dotted line for your name.
