The effect of the coronavirus on exams

True but it is nothing like as dangerous as say Spanish Flu was.

I understand what youre saying, and I agree that the coronavirus scare is being overblown to an extent, but the reality is if this turns into a big epidemic (which is looking liklier by the hour) hundreds of thousands of the old and vulnerable will likely die and god knows what will happen to the economy, will everyone be told to stay off work? There's even talk today of police being taken off the street and the army being brought in!!!

I really don't think the best solution in the midst of all of this would be to, what, have us go in in hazmat suits and sit our exams?!?!?! Or we've spent all these many months preparing for exams for them to be rescheduled? And what about if all the schools close and we end up not being taught for weeks or months and still sitting the exams??? None of the solutions seem to be viable

If the exams are rescheduled too when would they be rescheduled to? Obviously it would have to be when things had calmed down but by which point people may have things already booked for then because they were supposed to have sat their a levels by then. Equally we obviously need to be at uni by a certain point too so how would that all work when the exam board need so much time to mark our papers. I suppose the other bug thing for sitting exams is if we've missed significant amounts of taught time because of schools being closed and then obviously results won't be as great (and it won't be even because some schools may have got through content earlier) so then what happens with universities. Perhaps they'll conduct on a larger scale what they do for people with extenuating circumstances who miss lots of school and accept lower grades as a result. I don't know, it's just all uncharted territory really.

That’s what I thought too

Nah, they will just delay the exams.

If schools were shut due to a coronavirus outbreak (not saying that will definitely happen but if it did) what would happen with exams? I mean like A level and GCSE exams, A levels in particular because it's obviously relevant to universities as well. I mean if schools were to be closed for a month then that's a significant amount of time that was supposed to be spent studying for A levels that you've missed. Does anyone have any ideas what would be done realistically about that? It's just a thought that occurred to me and I was curious

I think you'll probably just get a longer study leave. I mean the last few months are just used for revision and exam practice anyway.

interestingly the fatality rate they suspect the coronavirus has (it's not official because they can't give anything official when there's still an outbreak) is actually very similar to the fatality rate of the outbreak of Spanish flu after the first world war. It's a bit strange because obviously it killed a LOT of people after the war so I guess a ridiculous amount of people must have been infected?

But some subjects aren't meant to finish teaching to content until very close to the exams. This will differ in every school and every subject. How is it fair that some students will have managed to do everything in class whilst others would have to self teach?

But some subjects aren't meant to finish teaching to content until very close to the exams. This will differ in every school and every subject. How is it fair that some students will have managed to do everything in class whilst others would have to self teach?

If schools were shut due to a coronavirus outbreak (not saying that will definitely happen but if it did) what would happen with exams? I mean like A level and GCSE exams, A levels in particular because it's obviously relevant to universities as well. I mean if schools were to be closed for a month then that's a significant amount of time that was supposed to be spent studying for A levels that you've missed. Does anyone have any ideas what would be done realistically about that? It's just a thought that occurred to me and I was curious

I dont understand why ucas and schools would go through all the hassle of rearranging our exams (and it will he us that end up biting the bullet if this happens) when they could just give us the predicted grades? Why does that not seem to be an option?

at our school, we've been told that if schools shut now for 2 months (which is what has been said by the health office) then we will get our UCAS predicted grades
they can't expect students to sit exams when the content hasn't been finished

I agree with you but I feel like predicted grades are unfair so I really hope there are other ways

What about those that didn't get predicted grades because they weren't applying to uni?

Nothing will happen, schools won't shut, the media just love to scare everyone

I think it would be extremely unfair for students to be given their mock grades or their predicted grades in the unlikely event that they are unable to sit their exams.

There's absolutely no standardisation across schools for mocks, they are all sat at different times and are very much of varying difficulty, and it would be extremely easy for people to cheat on a large scale within schools - plenty of people missed their mock exam dates and sat the same paper a few days later. Also it would be very unfair, for example, for a university to expect/require somebody with say an A*A*A offer to necessarily get A*A*A in their mock, especially considering the large time gap between mocks and real exams, and how people tend not to prepare for their mocks as though they were real exams.

Predicted grades have similar issues and I know people who managed to get their predicted grade raised from a B to an A* just from talking to their teachers. Also most schools will either overpredict or underpredict.

To be honest, I'm more worried that everything will be so chaotic that they won't be able to give every single student fair consideration, meaning that some people might get given an official A level grade based on incomplete assessment of information. Any thoughts?