Must do better... Exam board to pay out £1m over blunders

AN EXAM board is to pay out over £1 million in fines and compensation after failing to ensure papers were fairly re-marked.

AQA, one of England’s major exam providers, was slapped with a £350,000 penalty by the regulator Ofqual after ‘serious breaches’ were discovered.

It must also pay the 3,000 affected schools between £110 and £440 each in compensation. In total, AQA will pay out £1.1 million.

Ofqual said the board failed to ensure remarks of GCSEs and A-levels were not carried out by the original marker, or by someone without a personal interest.

About 50,000 re-marks were affected – 7 per cent of all reviews carried out by the exam board between 2016 and last year. Ofqual highlighted ‘failings in AQA’s online marking system, the limited availability of reviewers in low- entry qualifications and the relatively small size of some marking panels’. It said there was ‘no evidence’ pupils received the wrong grades.

However, it added: ‘The failures have the potential to seriously undermine public confidence in the review of marking.’

Mark Bedlow, AQA’s interim head, said: ‘I want to reassure everyone this technical issue – which we’ve fixed now – didn’t affect the outcome of anyone’s review. Where necessary, grades were still changed.’