‘It is unlikely that any of the 12,000 students sitting the exam would have recognised the value of the information’. OCR exam board
We say ...
Such was the hopeful claim made by the exam board after it gave away answers to its GCSE music listening test by accidentally printing them on the back of the paper.
As The TES reported last week, pupils could easily have deduced answers to several of the questions simply by reading the copyright information. When asked who had composed a particular piece of music, the name “Handel” next to the track number should have been a giveaway.
OCR’s optimistic claim that none of the 12,000 teenagers noticed the information flies in the face of two facts. First, many teachers reported that their pupils had noticed: one described some coming out of the exam “grinning like Cheshire cats”.
Second, the information was on the back of the paper, so it would have been the first thing the examinees saw as they sat down.
