Exam board faces £175,000 fine over error in question

AN EXAM board is to be handed a £175,000 fine after a GCSE exam error left thousands of students facing an unanswerable question on Shakespeare’s

A question in an OCR English literature GCSE paper, taken by candidates in May last year, confused the two warring families – the Capulets and the Montagues – in the famous tragedy about two star-crossed lovers.

At the time, the exam board – one of the largest in the country – apologised for the mistake and insisted that students would not be disadvantaged.

England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, has now announced that it intends to impose a hefty financial penalty of £175,000 on OCR, saying the error in the question meant that the content of the exam paper was “not fit for purpose”.

An OCR spokeswoman said the exam board would like to apologise to students, teachers and parents again, adding that it had revised its check system with the aim of “improving the quality of our question papers”.

The error read: “How does Shakespeare present the ways in which Tybalt’s hatred of the Capulets influences the outcome of the play?”

But Tybalt is Juliet’s cousin and a Capulet himself, so the question should have referred to his hatred of the Montagues. The question was one of two questions, with candidates having to pick one to answer.