Exam board apologises after telling students wrong topics

LEADING exam boards have been criticised by parents and the head of England’s exam regulator after thousands of pupils were tested on topics they had been told were ruled out of papers.

AQA has apologised twice during this year’s GCSE and A-level exam period, the first in-person assessments since 2019, following complaints about questions in the papers that were not included as part of the advance notice of topics.

Students this year were given advance topic notice in order to mitigate the impact of the pandemic after two years of exam chaos.

Yesterday, the board apologised to A-level law students for the “confusion and stress” they had been caused after a 30-mark question on nuisance was included in the paper despite not appearing in the list of topics pupils were informed to revise.

AQA had told pupils that “higher tariff questions” – those carrying more marks - would draw on the listed topics given to pupils before their exam.

The exam board also apologised last week after its GCSE physics paper included a nine-mark question on a topic that had been ruled out in the advance information.

The board ended up awarding all candidates full marks for the question on energy transfers and circuits in the physics paper after a social media backlash from angry students.

One parent, who wishes to remain anonymous, said her daughter had taken the physics paper in Gloucestershire and had left the assessment “upset” about the surprise question.

They told The Daily Telegraph: “Lots of pupils will have seen it and panicked. It could arguably have affected the way they performed in the rest of the paper.

“This cohort have just gone through two years of severely disrupted education and were assured certain things would not be in the exam, so to then put it in is pretty appalling.”

They added that they heard this is not an isolated incident.

Another exam board, Edexcel, was also forced to apologise over an error in its GCSE geography paper which labelled Gabon as the Democratic Republic of Congo on a map of Africa.

Jo Saxton, Ofqual’s chief regulator, told the Confederation of School Trusts’ annual conference on Friday that “the package of support in place for students for this year’s summer series” had had some “real bumps in this road”.

An AQA spokesperson said: “We didn’t mean to cause any confusion or stress for students and we’re sorry that we did.”