Exam boards should be abolished

I'm fairly sure that standard procedure in that case is that if the exam board loses your paper, then you are awarded the average of your other modules in that subject. Were his otehr modules in it also around a C grade?

I guarantee you, this time in august, there will be news stories about 500,000 incorrectly marked scripts. Exam boards are a joke, one day setting impossible questions, next day marking somebody down accidentally! My friend got a C in maths (predicted A*), he was shocked. He retook, and AFTER he retook, they told him that he got a C because THEY LOST HIS PAPER!

The big problem is that examiners want to do things too quickly, and i appreciate that they need to get stuff ready in time, but incorrect marking, incorrect questions are unacceptable!!!

Being a former chemistry teacher here in Scotland, I'm watching this fiasco with interest. Here we only have one exam board for all of Scotland, but it too has had problems. About 10yrs ago they changed the entire exam system without ironing out the bugs. One of these fairly(!) big bugs was making sure that the examiners marking the paper actually had a qualification in that subject!! (Techie teachers marking French papers, and Geography teachers marking Maths papers for example, as I recall).
My sister endured the mess that was marking that year. She got no results. None. Nada. We were involved in a class action suit against the exam board just for her to get _any_ results! That's how bad it was! (it took over a year to just get a paper certificate with grades on it!)
It got weirder: My sister sat Higher Music, and was expected to get an A (she had been planning to become a music teacher). She got zip for it! Eventually after a multitude of appeals, she finally got a C. (Partially because the exam board had lost most of the evidence it was sent, partially because they hadn't marked entire papers!). At the same time, a girl in my sister's year had decided after sitting in the music class for one week, that she did not want to continue to study music. She transferred course, and submitted no folio, and sat no exams. Come results time, she got the only A in music in the school (!!!?) Needless to say the exam board got an absolute hammering that year.
I've had impossible questions too, with the same exam board, before the above fiasco. (I hadn't seen any whilst teaching though.)
A fairly simple one was in my CSYS maths (then A-level equivalent) exam:
A car of mass M is travelling along a road at unknown velocity V. The driver sees a tree distance X ahead. He applies a breaking force of F and the vehicle slows down to a stop in time T to a distance of Y from the tree. Calculate V. All other numbers were given. Having done physics beforehand this was easy to answer using F=ma and the usual kinetics equations (much simpler than the calculus method we were to use, but perfect to get your answer first before working to it using the calculus). The only problem was that the answer just couldn't be correct. I then used the calculus methods. It gave the same number, just with a minus sign. So what was the problem? The car was either travelling forwards or backwards (the minus sign) at about (IIRC) 350 times the speed of light! (Bugatti Veyron eat your heart out!) Doh!! Okay, you could argue that the number was correct, but it was just impossible in this universe, and that the maths examiners either live in that universe or had just forgotten how fast light travels. The other question is less so easily explained away.
In the same paper a question on recurrence relations. We'd been shown how to caluclate arithmetic and geometric progressions, but we were asked to find the sum of a function that combined both in a truly bizarre way. IIRC it combined an arithmetic progression, a geometric one, both multiplied together and the power of one all combined together in some horrific way. It even stumped our teacher when we asked him afterwards! And I think it was only about 2 or 3 marks!
So in summary, all exam boards will make mistakes. Some minor (a typo in a few questions as is the current fiasco), to major ones like losing entire student answer booklets, and getting unqualified people to mark the papers. I know what I would rather have!!