Could the first major league disaster of the summer be about to break? There are rumblings about problems with the computer system marking exams. It’s to do with ETS, an American company that won the contract to run English SAT exams. The BBC has the first sniff of this – a fairly innocent problem of not being able to log on to the registration system to see which papers they should have. But postings on the Times Educational Supplement website complain of far worse – “major organisational problems”. There are rumours of a collapse in the “standardisation system”, which ensures markers use the same criteria in the Key Stage 3 tests. That the system which re-assesses borderline failure has also crashed. That markers have been so shocked by the incompetence, they have refused to take part.
It is difficult to understate how bad this could be. Eight years ago this happened in Scotland – and started as “teething problems” and ended up with thousands being given wrong exam results. This only affected a minority – 4,000 pupils were sent out the wrong exam certificates – but this cast a shadow over every single pupil’s exams. Those who had bad marks were never able to be sure if they’d flunked the exam, or been the victim of a computer crash. Brown and disaster tend to go together. So watch this space.
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