The ridiculous GCSE ICT exam questions that beat PC Pro

 

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Posted on 22 May 2008 at 11:51

Thousands of British schoolchildren are sitting ICT GCSE exams papers which are so badly worded or ambiguous that they baffled PC Pro's team of experienced journalists.

Find out how the PC Pro team scored in their GCSE exams here

Five of the PC Pro team sat the AQA 2007 ICT Higher paper, which pupils would have taken last summer. Several questions on the paper tripped up every member of the team because the answers demanded were so ridiculously stringent. Other multiple-choice questions that demanded pupils only tick one box had more than one correct answer, in the opinion of the Pro team.

We were alerted to the scandalous state of the exam papers by pupil Conor Rynne, who couldn't believe the standard of questions being set in his exams. "I have to say that I am appalled by the quality of ICT exam papers," Conor told us. "They are either too easy or are not very clear."

One of the questions with more than one potentially correct answer reads:

Tick one box to show a disadvantage of using a software package to help work out the budget rather than using a calculator, pen and paper.

The four options are:

1. The formulae could be wrong
2. The wrong prices could be input
3. A virus may corrupt the information
4. Multiple printouts could be produced

Answers 1 and 3 are both valid answers in our opinion, but the marking scheme insists that only answer 3 is valid.

Overly-testing

Another question asks pupils to define the term "testing" in the context of the design of a new ICT system.

The marking scheme defines the answer as:

A series of checks/tests to make sure the system (implied) is working as expected

Pupils have to use both underlined parts of the answer to score a mark, which means that children are bewilderingly expected to define "testing" as a "series of tests".

Deleted from where?

Conor drew our attention to another question on the 2007 Foundation paper, which asks:

When you receive an e-mail on a computer, you can delete it, reply to it or forward it. Tick two boxes to show which of these statements are true.

1. When you delete an e-mail, you can never look at it again

2. When you reply to an e-mail, the e-mail is automatically addressed to the person who sent it to you

3. When you forward an e-mail, you have to enter the address of the person you are sending it to

4. You always have to pay a fee each time you send an e-mail

5. When you forward an e-mail, attachments are removed

As Conor says, the first option "begs the question deleted from where? The inbox or the deleted items folder? This can lead to people ticking the wrong box (it was false in the answer booklet).

"I know that the exam paper is only 40% of the GCSE, but come on, surely the exam boards can make a bit of a better effort than that?," he adds.

Unbelievably easy

Other questions - even on the Higher paper which is meant to stretch the more advanced pupils - are so easy that it's difficult to believe that any pupil with a modicum of common sense could get them wrong.

Question 10, midway through the Higher paper, asks:

Simulators are used to give ambulance drivers experience of driving an ambulance at high speed. Which two of the following are important reasons why a simulator would be used for this rather than driving on a road?