Must do better: Exam board to pay out £1 MILLION in fines and compensation after failing to ensure that AQA papers were fairly re-marked
- AQA fined £350,000 by regulator Ofqual after ‘serious breaches’ discovered
- Board ‘failed to ensure re-marks were not carried out by the original marker’
- Will also have to pay 3,000 schools for errors, totaling £740,000
- Around 50,000 re-marks or moderations were affected – seven per cent of all reviews
An exam board has been fined a record penalty of £350,000 for failing to make sure papers are remarked in a fair way.
AQA, one of England’s major exam providers, was slapped with the fine by the regulator Ofqual after ‘serious breaches’ were discovered.
In addition, it will have to pay the 3,000 schools affected between £110 and £440 each – amounting to a total of £740,000.
Ofqual said the board failed to ensure re-marks and moderation of GCSEs and A-levels were not carried out by the original marker, or by someone without a personal interest in the outcome.
AQA, one of England’s major exam providers, was slapped with the fine by the regulator Ofqual after ‘serious breaches’ were discovered (stock photo)
Around 50,000 re-marks or moderations were affected, equating to around seven per cent of all reviews carried out by the exam board between 2016 and 2018.
Ofqual said the issue with the re-marks were a result of ‘failings in AQA’s online marking system, the limited availability of reviewers in low entry qualifications and the relatively small size of some marking and review panels’.
It said AQA had not ensured its workforce was of ‘appropriate size and competence’ to manage risks.
It stressed that there was ‘no evidence’ to show any learners or centres had received the wrong outcome.
Ofqual said AQA had not ensured its workforce was of ‘appropriate size and competence’ to manage risks
However, it added: ‘The failures therefore have the potential to seriously undermine public confidence in the review of marking, moderation and appeals system, and the qualifications system more generally.’
Mark Bedlow, AQA’s interim chief executive, said: ‘I want to reassure everyone that this past technical issue – which we’ve fixed now – didn’t affect the outcome of anyone’s review. Where necessary, grades were still changed.
‘Reviews of marking are only carried out by our best, most experienced examiners who are very unlikely to have made mistakes in their original marking – and, in the vast majority of cases, we’re talking about one isolated, anonymised answer from a paper being reviewed by the senior examiner who originally marked it.
‘But reviews should always be carried out by a fresh pair of eyes and we’re sorry that, for a small proportion in the past, this wasn’t the case. We’ve made sure we got it right this summer, just as we did after last year’s November exams.’