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The ridiculous GCSE ICT exam questions that beat PC Pro

By Barry Collins

Posted on 22 May 2008 at 11:51

1. The driver would not be in any danger using a simulator
2. Simulators are widely used throughout the country
3. Simulators are also used by the police and the fire brigade
4. Road and weather conditions on the simulator can be changed as needed
5. The simulator could be used during lunchtime

(Answers 1 and 4 are the correct ones, in case you were wondering).

Equally, another question displays five records from a database and asks "How many records are shown in this database table?".

"It's a test of whether you can count to five," concluded one of the PC Pro staff taking the test.

"No formal complaints"

AQA has denied its exam papers are flawed. "AQA refutes the suggestion in the article that its 2007 ICT GCSE papers were badly worded or ambiguous," the company claims in a statement.

"All of AQA's examination papers are subject to stringent checks by an experienced team of senior examiners to ensure they meet the specification requirements. While we note the difficulties encountered by the PC Pro team and one candidate identified in the article, we have received no formal complaints from our centres about papers being either badly worded or ambiguous.

"AQA is regulated by the QCA and all its examinations meet the rigour required by the regulator."

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User comments

A-Level

I can totally agree with this article, I recently sat the A2 ICT exam in the winter. Some of the questions in that exam were so badly worded that they could be seen as incomprehensible. It was exactly the same with the AS exam as well.

By diver_hal on 21 May 2011

ICT

The fact that computing was largely removed from schools was a result of pressure from HE where coding taught at school was frowned upon because it was not in an approved language and they thought it was badly taught. (Everything in school is badly taught is som places and brilliantly taught in others). At the same time, educationalists from HE who have generally read about children in a book but rarely taught any, decided that iCt was the thing and changed the content radically. Things are looking up though, CAS, (computing at school) is doing good work in getting coding and all the associated thinking skills back into school.
Just a parting shot, schools are not there to teach skills that are useful fro industry. two reasons amongst many. 1) For example, Adobe CS5 taught now will not be relevant to kids when it is CS21 by the time they leave HE.
2) Skill training is the job of industry, education can never hope to keep up with what industry needs and should not be expected to. Industry, put your hands in your pockets abnd train your own workers.

By nerak99 on 26 Jun 2011

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