Floods of angry biology students 'disgraced' by AQA

[MRaverz]

Currently I'm in the second year of my A levels and yesterday I had the joy of sitting my biology unit 4 exam, I wasn't too hopeful about it initially (mainly due to anxiety making me feel cruddy) yet was confident that I knew the stuff I needed to know. However as I went through the paper, I noticed that the syllabus hadn't seem to have been covered. All my revision on genetics, nitrogen cycle and the intricate details of photosynthesis seemed to have been wasted. Instead, it seemed that I had needed to simply revise decoding the confusing, misleading and irrelavant questions on 'repeatability' of 'hair tube experiments'.

I wasn't the only one to feel this way either, in fact I returned home to find that over two and a half thousand people had joined a facebook group associated to this dilemma: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=453647705494&ref=ts

Naturally this caught the attention of the media:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8480563.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jan/26/unfair-a-level-biology-exam-protest
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/board-to-take-account-of-facebook-exam-protest-1879534.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246220/Marking-relaxed-unfair-A-level-exam-paper-thousands-pupils-launch-Facebook-campaign.html?ITO=1490
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/810483-facebook-group-protest-over-ridiculous-aqa-biology-exam

So I was wondering if any of the younger members here had also taken the exam and what everyone's thoughts are on the issue.

 

[nasher168]

I guess redoing a year does have it's benefits, then...
I screwed up my AS last year so badly that I'm redoing the entire of year 12 (getting As now where I got Ds before, so it's the best choice I think). Either way, the result of this is that I missed this exam, which I would have been taking had I continued.
Chances are the grade boundary on that exam will be dropped, or else the exam itself will count for less, minimising the damage done.

EDIT: 5,900 members... And to think that only 20,000 took the exam... Minus perhaps a thousand who just joined for the sake of it, that's still almost a quarter of all examinees pissed off enough to join the group.

 

[Squawk]

Sounds like a bit of a farce. Best of luck getting them to admit it, keep us updated and I hope this all works out for ya.

 

[Giliell]

Well, they should simply repeat the exam. Happened here once when there was chemistry exam the teachers were not able to solve

 

[Squawk]

The suggestion this morning from the exam regulator was that they are entirely happy with the exam and that it fit the new criteria. In particular it involved application of knowledge rather than regurgitation of information.

Having not sat the paper and not done the course/read the syllabus I am in a fantastic position to make a tit of myself here, but the exam will be marked to fit a statistical distribution so it should still work out in the end.

BTW, the OCR crowd have also started a bit of a protest.

 

[5810Singer]

The suggestion this morning from the exam regulator was that they are entirely happy with the exam and that it fit the new criteria. In particular it involved application of knowledge rather than regurgitation of information.

Having not sat the paper and not done the course/read the syllabus I am in a fantastic position to make a tit of myself here, but the exam will be marked to fit a statistical distribution so it should still work out in the end.

BTW, the OCR crowd have also started a bit of a protest.

Apparently 7 out of 8 questions were on topics that had not even been covered in the syllabus of the students taking the exam.

I'm not familiar with statistics as a discipline,.....will a statistical distribution be able to even out the effect of 85% of the questions being unanswerable?

 

[richi1173]

Although I'm not familiar at all with the UK's education system, I can see that this is a slap in the face to students.

In the US we have exams called Advanced Placement which require a lot of dedication and prepwork, and I can see that your exams have similar requirements. For them to do this without informing the students and professors is uncalled for and I'm really happy that everybody involved is fighting it.

 

[MRaverz]

I guess redoing a year does have it's benefits, then...
I screwed up my AS last year so badly that I'm redoing the entire of year 12 (getting As now where I got Ds before, so it's the best choice I think). Either way, the result of this is that I missed this exam, which I would have been taking had I continued.
Chances are the grade boundary on that exam will be dropped, or else the exam itself will count for less, minimising the damage done.

EDIT: 5,900 members... And to think that only 20,000 took the exam... Minus perhaps a thousand who just joined for the sake of it, that's still almost a quarter of all examinees pissed off enough to join the group.

I think I might have to redo all the exams I sat in A2, these three latest ones at least. It's a pity because I did pretty well at AS, getting ABBB (and very close to AAAB). Then again last year I was expecting to fail physics and chemistry, so maybe things will turn out better than expected.

@Squawk: Urgh, AQA are trying to worm out of it? The paper focused on interpreting data and decoding cryptic questions, if I hadn't have revised I wouldn't have done much better. At first I thought it was just me failing to do well because I wasn't focused enough, but when others started saying the same I figured differently.

@5810Singer: Hopefully the grade boundaries will be lowered and I can manage to get a decent grade from it, but I think I'll be resitting it nonetheless. That being because I need an A for the universities I've applied too (I need ABB, an A in Biology as I plan to take Biology).


I should also add that in the textbook all students learnt from it clearly stated 'you will not need to know the Spearmans rank test'. Guess what came up in the test. D;

 

[Squawk]

The suggestion this morning from the exam regulator was that they are entirely happy with the exam and that it fit the new criteria. In particular it involved application of knowledge rather than regurgitation of information.

Having not sat the paper and not done the course/read the syllabus I am in a fantastic position to make a tit of myself here, but the exam will be marked to fit a statistical distribution so it should still work out in the end.

BTW, the OCR crowd have also started a bit of a protest.

Apparently 7 out of 8 questions were on topics that had not even been covered in the syllabus of the students taking the exam.

I'm not familiar with statistics as a discipline,.....will a statistical distribution be able to even out the effect of 85% of the questions being unanswerable?

You got a source for that? If the exam regulators are satisfied that seems like a dubious claim.

 

[MRaverz]

You got a source for that? If the exam regulators are satisfied that seems like a dubious claim.

I can find a couple images students who took the exams have made:
http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs236.snc3/22338_302977339257_615709257_4665820_72489_n.jpg
http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs163.snc3/19051_274965393420_602333420_3346157_1709982_n.jpg

Concerning Spearman's Rank:
http://photos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs193.snc3/20053_297411917322_527687322_4554470_3152619_n.jpg

 

[Nashy19]

Has your biology teacher commented (to AQA) on the exam yet?

 

[MRaverz]

Has your biology teacher commented (to AQA) on the exam yet?

I've not really spoken to them, I overheard one of them saying something retarded. But he's the religious one who doesn't accept climate change.

 

[Aught3]

I can find a couple images students who took the exams have made:
http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak ... 2489_n.jpg
http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak ... 9982_n.jpg

I didn't get it for a few minutes I was looking at the first picture thinking that they seemed like basic biology questions worth covering in the exam and then I realise this is more a list of what wasn't covered, very strange. You can get some weird questions in biology it's too bad your whole paper was like that.