• OCR Exam Board Cocks up a Question Worth 11% on Exam
    24 replies, posted
[release]One of England's biggest exam boards has been forced to apologise after pupils were set an impossible question in an AS-level maths paper. OCR promised to take the error into account when marking the exam, amid students' concerns that the mistake could affect their university places. The question, which was worth eight marks and 11% of the paper, was impossible to solve due to a miscalculation of an equation. Students were presented with a diagram showing a network of tracks in a forest. The distances between points on the network were also set out. Students were then asked to find the shortest route to walk along every track, starting and ending at the same point. The given length was supposed to be equal to an equation set out in the paper. But OCR admitted that it failed to calculate the length properly – meaning the shortest route failed to match the mathematical equation. A total of 6,790 sixth-formers sat the paper on Thursday 26 May. Since then, many have been posting messages on social networking sites calling for a resit, and expressing fears that the mix-up may harm their university chances. One student wrote on thestudentroom.co.uk: "Can we not all or the majority of us write to OCR and demand a resit?" Another said: "I agree, there is no fair way to mark it and loads of us need certain grades for uni." Grades from AS-levels are used by students when applying for university places. One poster suggested that students could attempt to bring legal action if they missed their grade, and therefore university places as a result of the error. "On a teaching website, a head of maths has proposed that a no win, no fee solicitor could bring a class action to represent anyone who fails to make their university offers because of this and ends up paying £9,000 per annum university fees instead of £3,000 per annum," wrote the poster. In a statement, an OCR spokesman said the exam board "very much regretted" the mistake. "We would like to assure teachers, parents and students that we have several measures in place to ensure that candidates are not unfairly disadvantaged as a result of this unfortunate error. "Because we have been alerted to this so early, we are able to take this error into account when marking the paper. "We will also take it into account when setting the grade boundaries. We have sent a letter to all schools and colleges explaining in more detail what we shall do. "We do apologise again that this has happened. To help us understand how this occurred and to minimise the chance of such an error happening again, we will be undertaking a thorough review of our quality assurance procedures."[/release] Sauce: [url]http://www.anhourago.co.uk/show.aspx?l=8503487&d=501[/url]
Wow, that's a big fuck up. This never happens for O levels!
Good job, how do you even MANAGE to fuck up this bad?
Wow, that's terrible, I can imagine it could easily affect your whole paper. Either by causing you to spend huge amounts of extra time rechecking the answer or simply stuffing your morale with the confusion of being sure you are right and told you are wrong. Ouch!
I question myself how something retarded like this could happen :frown:
Had a spelling mistake on my physics unit 1 back in January, but a whole question? Damn, they fucked up big time.
Sounds like the decision module, which sucks anyway, at least it is not a core paper.
[QUOTE=Terminutter;30200107]Had a spelling mistake on my physics unit 1 back in January, but a whole question? Damn, they fucked up big time.[/QUOTE] totally comparable
[QUOTE=Rct33;30200114]Sounds like the decision module, which sucks anyway, at least it is not a core paper.[/QUOTE] Still a major issue for anyone doing further maths... And it is comparable - one tiny mistake is perfectly fine, but a whole question being unanswerable is a major fuck up.
[QUOTE=Terminutter;30200107]Had a spelling mistake on my physics unit 1 back in January, but a whole question? Damn, they fucked up big time.[/QUOTE] Was it this? [img]http://filesmelt.com/dl/Phys1.JPG[/img] Totally ruined your paper n shit.
[QUOTE=aznz888;30199574]Good job, how do you even MANAGE to fuck up this bad?[/QUOTE] They printed the wrong numbers, could have been a simple typo. The BBC article has more details [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13627415[/url]
Yep. Hardly complaining, just think that they'd proofread them before printing. If one exam board notices a tiny issue, but another lets a huge mistake through, then what's going on?
I can just imagine myself getting bogged down on that question going "THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE" When I did GCSE electronics 2 years ago there was a similar cock up on one of the diagrams of a 555 timer, the connections were drawn in completely the wrong place, luckily it was only worth a few marks
What makes me angry about some of these big tests is that they are considered "validated" or something by the test body. This essentially means you cannot dispute or ask any questions during the test about the test because the questions are known to be clear, correct, and free of any errors. All of my EMT module tests were made by the University of Maryland and were "validated" or whatever it's called. Funny because there were a few tragic spelling errors on some of the questions. Some of the questions were impossible to answer because they did not have the right answer listed.
Imho they should redo the exam, even if they count the question out of the marking, just think of the time some students might have spent trying to solve it while they could be working on the other questions.
Shit like this pisses me the fuck off. Exams are so fundamentally flawed it's horrific. I did an A2 Psychology paper in January, and after getting a shitty grade, got the paper back, found it to be horribly marked, sent it back for remarking and it went up [b]twelve percent[/b].
[QUOTE=Thorny;30202282]Psychology[/QUOTE] here's your problem
FUCKING DECISION MATHS it's fucking impossible as it is they didn't need to make it literally unsolvable.
Aren't they meant to check over exam papers hundreds of times before they publish them?
Exams are fucking ridiculous. Rote learning =/= university qualified.
It won't be that bad - I imagine they will take the average of that paper without the messed up question as the mark for the whole paper. Some people will still cry that they lost time on a broken question though.
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;30202810]here's your problem[/QUOTE] what is this supposed to mean
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;30205703]what is this supposed to mean[/QUOTE] Psychology is a bunch of bullshit is probably his point lol
This was during a Further Pure 1 Mathematics exam
A math paper asked them to solve the TSP?
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