England’s largest schools exam board has escaped a fine for breaching exam re-marking rules in November 2019, despite facing a £1 million penalty for breaking the same rules last autumn.
Previously, Ofqual announced it would impose a fine of £350,000 on AQA because of the exam board’s reviews of marking and moderation in 2016, 2017 and 2018 - when it allowed a situation where examiners could re-mark their own work.
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The board also had to pay affected centres £735,570 in compensation through credit notes.
The fines related to marking reviews of GCSE and A-level papers during 2016-18, when according to Ofqual: “AQA failed to ensure that all of its reviews of marking and moderation in respect of GCE and GCSE qualifications were carried out in their entirety by a person who had not been involved in the original marking.”
It was also fined £50,000 over concerns over its 2018 French A-level mark scheme.
But then, in autumn 2019, AQA conducted 350,000 reviews of marking and moderation and found there were two cases that year “in which the person conducting the review of marking” had been involved in marking some of the original scripts, which it informed the regulator of on 8 November.
The scripts were reviewed again by an independent reviewer, and there were no “adverse effects on learners,” according to AQA.
The breaches were found to have occurred because of human error, according to the regulator.
“The two breaches occurred as a result of human error because the individuals undertaking the manual allocations failed to undertake the prescribed checks to ensure independent reviewing,” Ofqual’s report said.
The committee will not impose a fine but will seek to recoup the cost of its investigation, as well as recovering costs of £19,083 for prior breaches in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
An AQA spokesperson said: “This was human error that only affected two of the 350,000 reviews we carried out last summer. Overall, the measures we put in place to make sure reviews are carried out independently have been a big success.”
