Exam board defines “short graphic file” and defies logic

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

The exam board Edexcel isn’t covering itself in glory this week. Yesterday we reported how the board failed hundreds of teenage students because their work was submitted in the wrong format. Now, a teacher’s been in touch to reveal an alarming lack of know-how from the board’s so-called IT “Experts”.

Puzzled by an Edexcel paper that demanded his pupils produce a document containing ”a short graphic file from the internet”, our man sent a letter to the board’s experts to find out exactly what they meant.

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Who’s top of the PC Pro class?

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

As you may have read from our news story on the appalling state of GCSE IT examinations, five of the PC Pro team has sat the same ICT GCSE Higher paper that thousands of teenagers would have sweated over last summer.

So how did our team of so-called experts do?

Top of the class was deputy editor, David Fearon, who scored a lofty 70 out of 80 – which in this day and age is probably enough to land him a scholarship at Oxford, let alone an A*. David only let himself down on his definitions of testing, extreme data and erroneous data – although given the ridiculously prescriptive marking scheme, we believe it was the answers that were erroneous, rather than David.

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