4,000 pupils were set impossible questions

Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-one Business Studies candidates were affected by an error in one cell of a table of data in a CCEA GCSE paper whilst 738 Business Studies candidates were not given a profit figure to calculate a question in an AQA AS paper.

In an AQA AS Geography paper 185 pupils were given a figure which should have read 0.05 but was printed as 0.5; in a CCEA Further Maths paper 122 pupils were asked to answer a question which contained a plus sign instead of a minus sign; and in an OCR GCSE Latin paper 105 pupils encountered three errors involving the use of the incorrect name of the writer of, or character in, a Latin passage.

Fifty nine AS Computing candidates were given an AQA paper in which a diagram within one question was inaccurate causing possible confusion; and 58 A2 Physics pupils were given an OCR paper containing two conflicting units of measurement; centimetres and metres, when both should have been metres.

Three AS Maths students were given an OCR paper that included two incorrect expressions which made it impossible for the candidates to prove them

And the number of Northern Ireland students affected by a mistake in an AQA GCSE Maths paper - an error occurred during the printing of additional copies of the paper which resulted in the insertion of questions from a previous paper - is not yet known although to date two NI schools with a total of 10 students have been identified as having received affected papers.

A further school has been identified as potentially having received affected papers and the Department of Education (DE) is awaiting confirmation from AQA on the number of students, the Education Minister revealed.

The Minister provided the details in response to an Assembly Question.

Mr O’Dowd stated:

“There have been 10 reported incidents this summer involving errors in examination papers from a number of awarding bodies.”

He went on to say: “Awarding organisations have procedures in place to ensure that marking is fair to all candidates and the qualifications regulators have emphasised to the awarding organisations that no candidate should be disadvantaged by errors within papers.”