This results day, up to 4,000 A-Level students could have been given incorrect grades according to the Mail. Many students who were expecting high grades on their exams were met with U grades in one or more subject. The mistake concerns exams taken with examination board AQA. It appears that thousands of students were incorrectly marked as absent for exams that they sat. Other students were told that their coursework was marked as ‘not classified’, despite being told that they had passed.
Students were able to call their university and request that their place be held while the issue was dealt with. The deadline for holding places ended yesterday, meaning that students who were not able to correct the issue with AQA may have lost out on a university place.
Others on social media accused the exam board of loosing exam papers all together. One Twitter user wrote: “I went into work today (summer school) there was a yr 13 boy there with his parents, aqa just have straight up lost one of his papers. School requested the script, and only got the notes he made, not the essay.”
Incorrect marking combined with strikes
AQA staff have been on strike throughout August. This meant that, while students were trying to seek answers, there were only two days with a full workforce between August 17-28.
A spokesperson for AQA said: ‘It’s normal in any year to have some pending results for a number of reasons, and these represent a really tiny proportion of the 3 million+ grades we award each summer. But we know how hard students have worked for these results – and our teams work to resolve them as quickly as possible.
‘We have a priority, fast-track process whenever there’s a university place involved, and we have a dedicated team who work with schools, colleges and UCAS to meet their deadlines.’
