The Blunders of Exam Boards

On the 13^th of June 2013 thousands of students, including some of my friends were in the exam rooms to complete the A-Level Maths C3 Paper from Edexcel; it was a vital paper, for many it would be one of the deciding factors of their place at the universities they had applied to. When the year 13 students came out of their respective centres an outburst of anger was heard across the country; there were numerous complaints which included the paper being far too difficult, the real papers apparently being lost in the post and several Facebook pages being set up in an effort to reach out to the exam board (See the main one here https://www.facebook.com/EdexcelC3June2013ComplaintPage).

Through a horrendous mistake, Edexcel may well have cost thousands of students their university places. This wasn’t the first time that Edexcel had messed up a critical qualification; I was at witness to this myself upon receiving my AS English results in 2012; my class was very frustrated to learn that our entire English Literature coursework had been marked down because according to Edexcel we had missed a critical aspect of the specification. Our teacher stressed time after time to us that this was incorrect and attempted to contact the exam board to point out their mistake; but Edexcel stood firm and not allowing their reputation to be jeopardised refused to re-grade our coursework. In this instance we were able to retake the coursework and raise it back to where it should have been graded in the first half of Year 13.

Maths C3 on the other hand is a far more stressful situation for this was an end of year exam and retakes are not allowed at any exam centre; it’s difficult to determine how Edexcel will react to the situation at the moment. Will they refuse to offer compensation like they did for my English group a year ago? This may change given the scale of the mistake against a large number of students; regardless the Maths students remain deeply upset about what happened and are aiming their demands and criticisms straight at the exam board, rightfully so. Some are demanding free retakes while others are ordering lowered grade boundaries or even being given their target grades as final results.

Exam boards are known to be ruthless in their business practices; if their reputation gets damaged then that means no trust from education centres which in turn means their course materials will be purchased and studied less by schools and their students. Even so, when a blunder this big occurs, they cannot hide from criticism and will likely be forced to take responsibility for making things right with the students.

Were you affected by the C3 Maths? How do you think Edexcel should deal with this? Are they on the way out as an exam board?