Advice sought

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No1diamondgeezer
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Sep 19, 2016 9:36 pm

Advice sought

Post by No1diamondgeezer »

Hello,

First time poster here and thank you for taking the time to read my message.

Last Thursday my daughter took the 11+ cem exam in Bucks. That evening I asked her how she got on and she thought that she did ok, answered most of the paper and guessed the last few questions due to time constraints. She then informed in that for one section, non verbal reasoning, she realised that her answers were out of sync to the questions e.g answering what she thought to be Q10 but was in fact Q9.

I asked why she did not inform one of the invigilators present and her response was that she had her hand up for at least 2 minutes but no one came to her aid and so proceeded to try and correct her mistakes. After the test she did not raise her issue with anyone.
The next day, Friday, I had planned to see the head teacher about this in the morning but the weather was atrocious, flash flooding, roads grid locked, which resulted in me being late dropping off my daughter. As I had to get to work and battle through the unusually high traffic I could not visit the head teacher as I had planned.

Monday morning arrives and once I drop off my daughter I make a beeline to see the head teacher. I then discussed the matter after which the response was that the examinations report had already been written, last Thursday, and that there was not much else we could do as the incident had not been brought to their attention. I had reassurance that this 'would not matter' but I stressed that this could be the difference between a pass or a fail and I specifically requested that our discussion be logged.

May I clarify if this is indeed true in that if an incident was not logged prior to the examinations report being finalised and sent then effectively are we too late to do anything?

Any feedback will be most welcomed.
Daogroupie
Posts: 11099
Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 3:01 pm
Location: Herts

Re: Advice sought

Post by Daogroupie »

Well done for insisting that your meeting be logged.

Invigilators are paid to continually watch the room for hands up from candidates. I worked as a GCSE invigilator and we were not allowed to read or communicate with each other and at all times one of us had to be walking up and down the lines of candidates looking out for hands up.

My advice to any student in any exam who is being ignored is to stand up loudly by pushing their chair backward. That will soon get an invigilator scurrying towards you because if you actually leave your table that will count as an incident and will need to be logged.

If however you stand up but do not leave your table that can be dealt with by the invigilator.

I have been told by several students this year that they saw other students being handed blank answer sheets during CEM sections so clearly the getting out of sync issue is a common problem. The extra blank answer sheet being handed over would need to be logged on the invigilator report sheet.

Did your dd have time to change the answers for the whole section? DG
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