One in three pupils 'will get wrong exam results'

THE exam system is so riddled with errors that up to one in three children receives the wrong grades, an education watchdog warned today.

Dr Paul Newton blew the whistle on the "inevitable" inaccuracy in the marking of tests taken by hundreds of thousands of children every year.

He suggested it could be necessary to publish "error margins" to serve as warnings alongside pupils' exam results. Dr Newton, head of assessment research at exams regulator Ofqual, was speaking after one of the biggest marking fiascos in history.

Sats results for 1.2 million pupils were delayed last summer. Tests for 14-year-olds were abolished and the Government's National Assessment Agency was closed down after the debacle.

Dr Newton called for a more open discussion of the "dirty laundry" of the exams world.

He said that two experienced and competent markers would have different views about the grade an individual exam answer should receive.

It is therefore not possible to ensure papers are marked with accuracy, he said. Speaking to a seminar organised by exam group Cambridge Assessment, Dr Newton likened details of the inaccurate marking to "a Damien Hirst cow in formaldehyde".

"It's not pretty, it's slightly shocking, we're not even sure whether we want to look at it. But it is there for the world to see," he said.

One expert has suggested that 30 per cent of all 11-year-olds receive the wrong grades in their primary school Sats tests, he said. The true figure may be nearer 16 per cent, but the public will struggle to accept even this level of error amid high expectations.

Dr Newton said it was not even clear that externally marked exams were more reliable than teachers' assessments of their own pupils, which has been the key argument in favour of the £700 million-a-year testing industry.

"If we are more open and transparent and put things like error messages and confidence intervals around results we will probably find that there is an uproar to begin with," Dr Newton said. "But that won't necessarily undermine the system so that it collapses.

"I don't think we know enough about the reliability of our tests and examinations. We know they are not perfectly reliable.

"But do we know how reliable they are? Do we know whether they are more reliable now than they were 20 years ago, or 120 years ago?

"Do we know whether exams are more or less reliable than teacher assessment, even?" he asked.

"We are in a situation that's very problematic because consistently every year there are reports of errors in the newspapers. We are in a situation that we have got to confront."

Schools Secretary Ed Balls has been warned a similar Sats marking fiasco is possible next year.

Mr Balls established Ofqual as a new watchdog independent of ministers in an effort to boost public confidence in exams.