Exam Blues.

GCSE Student

The Tabloids in the UK have been going off their Red Tops with indignation that students penning swear words in their English answer papers are getting rewarded. An examination board chief provoked the media indignation by suggesting it is okay if they do not go wrong with the spelling and grammar. The Telegraph reports of some cases in an English paper for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). In one case a pupil who wrote a “two-word obscenity” (Fuck Off to you and I) in answer to the question “Describe the room you’re sitting in”; on a 2006 GCSE paper was given two marks out of a possible 27 for the expletive. That translates to 3.5 in percentage points.

It would have gone up to 11 percent had he punctuated it with an exclamation mark (Fuck Off!), said Peter Buckroyd, The Chief Examiner of English for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), an examination board. To gain minimum marks in English, students must demonstrate “some simple sequencing of ideas” and “some words in appropriate order”. The obscenity had achieved this, according to Mr Buckroyd.

The government’s examinations regulator, Ofqual, apparently agrees with Buckroyd’s approach. The AQA board has, however, stipulated that markers should contact them if swear words were used in an inappropriate manner.

A spokesperson for the body said: “AQA’s offices will advise them in accordance with Joint Council for Qualification guidelines. Expletives in a script would either be disregarded, or sanctioned.” Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Secretary, says Mr Buckroyd’s strategy was “taking the desire for uniformity and consistency to absurd lengths.”


Harrow School

However before the Tabloids go completely off their Red Tops with indignation about dumbing down of examination standards and F#*king Exams let us consider that students getting marks for writing little more than their name is not a new phenomenon. Winston Churchill’s description in “My Early Life” of the Latin prose paper that he took as part of the entrance examination to Harrow; “I wrote my name at the top of the page,” he writes. “I wrote down the number of the question ‘1’. After much reflection I put a bracket round it thus ‘(1)’. But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true.


Young Winston

“Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle: and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it up to the Headmaster’s table. “It was from these slender indications that Mr Welldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed that he was a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things: a man not dependent upon paper manifestations. I have always had the greatest regard for him.”

Clearly there are many Mr Welldons among today’s examiners.

Or “Ad astra per alia porci”* as Churchill may have said some years later when his Latin prose had improved!

* "To the heavens on the wings of a pig."