11 Plus Exams Forum

My DS has permission to type his A2 exams and has completed all the relevant paperwork etc. He has complained often that the programme they have to use for exams is difficult to use in an exam situation because he doesn't know how much he has written. I have queried this with the school and they say the exam boards state they must use the "word pad" programme and this has no word count and it can't be added. If this is correct (is there a link?) does anyone have any strategies for getting round the problem that they have taught their students.

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Thanks Belinda. I appreciate that students handwriting exams won't know the word count either but I believe this programme doesn't divide it up into pages either. So it is just continuous prose with paragraphs, which makes it hard to judge.

I have just asked my DS who has used a laptop for GCSE’s. He said he uses Word in exams (not wordpad). The spell checker etc is disabled, but it still has the word count facility available.

I wonder if this is down to what programme the schools choose to use rather than the exam board? I can see that using wordpad would be quite hard. But maybe it is different for A levels rather than GCSE?

I'd have thought that it would be difficult to know how many words were written by hand also ?

I guess the practice in class is the important thing - my children have done essay after timed essay, and I'm fairly confident they are being told whether they've written enough or not.

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FWIW, you can check the page count by doing a print preview.