My complaint email to OCR about Biology F215 June 2012

why is it ocr's fault that your dont have enough common sense to do some past/mock papers before an exam, especially recent ones because they will be more likely to have similar styled questions than the last one. ''oh its not fair lalala'' you put yourself at a disadvantage by not looking at the past paper. The response your gonna get is ''there's nothing we can do'' and ''we're the exam board we decide the questions'' all stretched into a fancy letter. Shame. And i hope you get the grade you deserve.

preach it

Reply 21

jesse111

Original post by Flyteryder

The paper was from 2003, it was not a recent paper, and it was not available on the website or to most teachers. There are rumours that private school students were given the paper the day before the 2012 exam and told the question would come up.

I don't get how you can neg me and continue to talk rubbish. If private schooled students were given the paper then do like them and get better sources. In my chemistry exam a few weeks ago there were some pretty arkward questions that I didn't like, am I going to ring up AQA and tell them to lower the grade boundaries by 15 marks because I didn't like the question ? No! Because I prepared well by reading through old mocks from January 2012 to January 2007, which is why im confident Ill score well, and if I dont I'll blame myself (not AQA) because it means I didnt study/read through hard enough. Hope you enjoy The Open University.

Reply 22

YB101

17

Original post by otrivine

thats cheating you mean that the teachers might have saw the paper and told their students i go to a private school but my bio teacher did not say anything?

All papers are sealed there is no way they would have been able to see it. I know how this works.

Also, the paper is available online. It's a legacy paper. It's available pretty much anywhere!
A decent school would have given there students ALL the past papers and made them do as many past paper questions as possible

Reply 23

otrivine

14

Original post by YB101

All papers are sealed there is no way they would have been able to see it. I know how this works.

Also, the paper is available online. It's a legacy paper. It's available pretty much anywhere!
A decent school would have given there students ALL the past papers and made them do as many past paper questions as possible

cause i go to private college and my biology teacher just told me to do all the papers from OCR website the new ones ? but better revise all the legacy paper in case they dont do the same thing for unit 4

Reply 24

AndrewJames

I don't think the point is that it was not available , however this was not the same course it was an old course so the paper that it was taken from should not necessarily be considered relevant revision. My school certainly provided enough revision materials without going that far back to a different course. However that does not give the exam board any good reason to reuse a question. If a question is reused it nullifies any understanding that anyone who has seen the question before as all a student has to do is put exactly what they saw on a mark scheme. It gives an unfair advantage as a student can know exactly what is being looked for in a question.

Reply 25

otrivine

14

YES ITS not fair i mean i liked the other questions they were fine but this muscle question is not fair and even they used the same LETTERS which is shocking not even like A,B,C it was just copy and pasted

Reply 26

tiny hobbit

15

Original post by Flyteryder

The paper was from 2003, it was not a recent paper, and it was not available on the OCR website or to most teachers. There are rumours that private school students were given the paper the day before the 2012 exam and told the question would come up.

But you had no trouble finding it online!

Most teachers (and schools) will have paper copies of old papers, so there is nothing secret about them.

Reply 27

tiny hobbit

15

Clearly my school is cheating by putting together questions from the old specification to make extra practice papers!

With exams for the new specifications only starting in 2009, that's not nearly enough practice papers for serious students.

Reply 28

ninjalamb

1

Original post by jesse111

Why is it OCR's fault that your dont have enough common sense to do some past/mock papers before an exam, especially recent ones because they will be more likely to have similar styled questions than the last one. ''Oh its not fair lalala'' you put yourself at a disadvantage by not looking at the past paper. The response your gonna get is ''There's nothing we can do'' and ''We're the exam board we decide the questions'' all stretched into a fancy letter. Shame. And I hope you get the grade you deserve.

Most logical post in this thread.

Reply 29

AndrewJames

Why is everyone assuming that this particular Old course's papers are every schools first go to for revision for an exam which has loads of past papers already and loads of other better suited revision materials. It just so happens that there are a few crossovers in the syllabus , that is not an excuse to re-use questions, might as well just give some students the whole paper.

Reply 30

Tyles

10

it shouldn't be EXACTLY the same...

Reply 31

tiny hobbit

15

Original post by AndrewJames

Why is everyone assuming that this particular Old course's papers are every schools first go to for revision for an exam which has loads of past papers already and loads of other better suited revision materials.

You may consider that 4 past papers (Jun 2010 - Jan 2012) is "loads of past papers", but I think that serious students need far more than that.

Reply 32

aliyah1994

2

you know, the people who've done the exam question before might not get the full marks anyway, mistakes happen... maybe we should just let it be. plus the whole point of exams is to show what you learn, right? and if people learned from that question then good for them, but you might score more than them on other parts :smile:

Reply 33

hprmc

you cant say that "its your fault for not doing enough past papers" because this was a paper from the old course... i didnt even know these legacy papers existed and im sure many other people didnt either... so how does this reflect the amount of revision ive done? how is it my fault that i didnt know that there were papers out there similar to ours, and how is it my fault if i have rubbish teachers who dont tell me these things to give us past questions? why is it right for OCR to put students in such a situation where they are disadvantaged just because they didnt do a certain past paper?
its just a stupid arguement to say that just because you havent done a certain past paper, you havent done enough revision.
lets say a student did no revision at all but happened to come across the 2003 past paper because they did it in lesson or something. why should that student be able to gain 10 easy marks just because of chance? its ridiculous.

Reply 34

YB101

17

Original post by otrivine

cause i go to private college and my biology teacher just told me to do all the papers from OCR website the new ones ? but better revise all the legacy paper in case they dont do the same thing for unit 4

exactly. this is what everyone should have done.

Reply 35

YB101

17

Original post by hprmc

you cant say that "its your fault for not doing enough past papers" because this was a paper from the old course... i didnt even know these legacy papers existed and im sure many other people didnt either... so how does this reflect the amount of revision ive done? how is it my fault that i didnt know that there were papers out there similar to ours, and how is it my fault if i have rubbish teachers who dont tell me these things to give us past questions? why is it right for OCR to put students in such a situation where they are disadvantaged just because they didnt do a certain past paper?
its just a stupid arguement to say that just because you havent done a certain past paper, you havent done enough revision.
lets say a student did no revision at all but happened to come across the 2003 past paper because they did it in lesson or something. why should that student be able to gain 10 easy marks just because of chance? its ridiculous.

it was such an easy question, I just don't understand the hype. it's pretty much labelling something you should be familiar with!

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 36

AndrewJames

Original post by tiny hobbit

You may consider that 4 past papers (Jun 2010 - Jan 2012) is "loads of past papers", but I think that serious students need far more than that.

Indeed you may be happy to point out that there are not enough papers for 'serious' students but as a student who is serious I was provided by my school with many other relevant resources , however my school did not use the papers that this question was copied from . If I have a suitable amount of resources there is no reason for me to go out seeking papers from 2003 , however should a school decide to use them that is fine but that is not a reason for an exam board to re-use a question on the off chance it has been seen by a % of the current candidates as it gives an unfair advantage.

I am not arguing that it was not available to me it clearly is online and I could have used these papers but I am arguing that copying a question word for word is really an unacceptable practice.

Reply 37

Norton1

18

Original post by AndrewJames

X

I can only hope you're not doing an essay subject at Uni; all the questions are repeated!

Reply 38

Nickini

2

It seems to be the people who don't think this is a problem either didn't sit the exam, or had done the question before. :rolleyes:

I had done this question before, although I didn't recognise it as I'd done it awhile ago. I thought it looked familiar, but put it down to OCR just making a very similar question. In fact it was the exact same, not even reworded, I don't see how anyone can argue that this is acceptable.

If this was an essay question, then it would be understandable, but it was an entire question broken into several different parts, all the exact same, right down the the two diagrams used.

Original post by Flyteryder

I am writing to complain about one of the questions asked in the F215 Biology paper I sat on 15th June 2012. Two sections of a question, worth 10 marks collectively, were directly copied word for word from question 4a and 4b of the 'Mammalian Physiology and Behaviour' 2805/05 paper from June 19th 2003, which can be seen here: http://pastpapers.org/A2/biology/mammalian/2003%20June%20QP.pdf

Actually, in our paper it was worth 11 marks, they made the question about glycogen granules two marks instead of one, but that was literally the only difference, they didn't even reword the question, just added a few more lines to write on.