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AQA need a kicking
Oh dear. This was the exam that two of my students sat today. They're both reasonably dyslexic and one has problems with his attention too. R will probably have coped: although her spelling and punctuation are both eclectic, she can write clear and coherent answers to questions. O will probably have gone into a frothing panic because he finds the vocabulary in science hard to deal with at the best of times, and really needs the multiple choice aspect in order to show what he's capable of. (He's one of these kids who can give me mostly sensible answers to questions that I ask him orally, and can even give mostly reasonable answers orally to questions that he reads; but if he has to both read the question AND write an answer down, something goes wrong in his brain and the answer comes out all wrong.)
How can the exam board insist that "Students will not be disadvantaged by the error"? What they mean is that they'll shuffle down the grade boundaries by a few points to compensate for the mistake, but this is only fair for average students with no special needs. For anyone who has a special need - be it dyslexia or specific learning disability, or an anxiety disorder such as severe exam stress, or people on the autistic spectrum who are greatly upset by changes in routine, or the visually impaired who rely on the exam paper having a particular format - this mistake could cause a loss of more than a couple of marks.
I only hope that O got to do his Biology 1b exam before the Physics 1a, so the mess-up with P1a didn't affect his ability to do B1b.
How can the exam board insist that "Students will not be disadvantaged by the error"? What they mean is that they'll shuffle down the grade boundaries by a few points to compensate for the mistake, but this is only fair for average students with no special needs. For anyone who has a special need - be it dyslexia or specific learning disability, or an anxiety disorder such as severe exam stress, or people on the autistic spectrum who are greatly upset by changes in routine, or the visually impaired who rely on the exam paper having a particular format - this mistake could cause a loss of more than a couple of marks.
I only hope that O got to do his Biology 1b exam before the Physics 1a, so the mess-up with P1a didn't affect his ability to do B1b.
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(And not that standardized exams don't royally stink for students with disabilities, in any event. Once one has admitted of any concept of diversity whatsoever, the idea that students can be meaningfully scored and ranked on any linear scale is a bit ridiculous.)
I hope O will be all right.
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Basically they're asking candidates to write answers to a multiple choice paper? Or just indicate which choice they'd choose on the question paper? What the fucking fuck? I blame the BBC's reporting too though - they always mangle everything.
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If your students have special needs which are more likely to mean they'll get thown by this then encourage them to have their SENCO contact the exam board so that "individual circumstances" can be taken further into account. The exam board isn't allowed to speak to the student, but the exams people can and should handle it for the student. This being the November series is less crammed than the Jan or Summer so the schools can't claim they're too busy.
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