Teachers to face tighter rules for setting exams to avoid cheating

Measures are being introduced to tighten regulation of classroom teachers who help set public examinations in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the cheating scandal that hit two prestigious private schools last summer.

The exams watchdog Ofqual had considered banning teachers from instructing topics on which they have written exam questions but ruled this out, saying that keeping active teachers involved in preparing exams would ensure quality.

In future, teachers will not be told whether or when any of the exams they have developed will be used, and exam boards will be expected to keep up-to-date records of all conflicts of interest.

Exam boards will have to provide ethical training to teachers who write exam papers to support them “to do the right thing”. They will also be required to detect malpractice by looking out for any unusual patterns in the results of pupils taught by teacher-examiners.

The crackdown comes amid growing concern about exam malpractice, in particular teachers cheating to try to improve their pupils’ results. Last summer, pupils at Eton and Winchester had marks annulled in economics and art history papers for the Pre-U – an exam favoured by some schools as an alternative to A-levels – after it emerged that students had prior access to material that later appeared in their final exams.

Source: theguardian