Exam adaptions to mitigate the impact of Covid on learning - including the release of advance information, optional content and the provision of formulae sheets - “supported” teachers and enabled exams to go ahead, the exams regulator has said.
Ofqual’s annual report says that the package of support for 2022 exams was “unprecedented” and included a “wide range of adaptions”.
The report cites the optional content or topics in four GCSE subjects; advance information about the focus of the content of the exams for all other GCSE, AS- and A-level subjects; the provision of equation and formulae sheets; and modifications to the requirements for non-exam assessment and practical work in a number of subjects.
The report, published today, says that these changes were designed to “mitigate some of the pressure on teaching time and the pressure that students experience when revising for and sitting exams”.
GCSE exams 2022: Ofqual praises ‘wide range of adaptations’
And it concludes: “We believe that, taken together, this package of measures has supported teachers and students and enabled exams to go ahead in 2022.”
Summer exams have now finished and there has been some criticism over how mitigations for exams were implemented.
In a letter to new education secretary James Cleverly and Ofqual chair Ian Bauckham yesterday, Robert Halfon, chair of the cross-party Commons Education Select Committee, said that multiple exam papers sat by students this summer “ignored” advance information or contained “errors” due to exam board “negligence”.
The errors would have resulted in students facing “unnecessary distress and anxiety” during this “already stressful period of high-stakes summer exams”, Mr Halfon wrote.
And he suggested that financial penalties should be levied on exam boards that issued papers with errors
Students were given advance notice of exam topics to focus their revision in February.
Responding to the letter, Ofqual said it had “noted the contents”, that regulator action was “in scope” whenever there were potential breaches of its rules, and that this was something it would “consider” once the “immediate interests of students” were taken into account.
