The Student Room Group

Grading 2021 and TSR's Unofficial Markschemes

Following the recent grading announcements by the DFE and Ofqual, we have seen an increase in questions around previous exam papers on TSR. We have also seen some conversation on the announcement thread, and I had promised to look at the issue and give an update as soon as we could.

We have worked with the DFE, Ofqual and Exam Boards over the course of this academic year and have fed in a representation of students' concerns and issues throughout the exam cancellation and consultation process. During this time, we raised on more than one occasion our belief that it is simply not feasible to remove all mention of previous exam papers and conversation from TSR nor from any other platform or social network. This is a view that is agreed with across the board.

Given the changes to GCSE, Vocational and A-level grading this year we believe that these conversations can continue to stay up on site without giving students an unfair advantage. Exam Boards know about the prevalence of conversations and topics around past papers online and will be giving a bank of questions to choose from as well as guidance to teachers on the best way of doing this. Given the nature of our unofficial markschemes, we believe that these posts won’t give a student an advantage given the fact that students will sit a bespoke set of both previously seen and unseen questions in a classroom setting. It's also worth noting here that students should also not be receiving advanced notice on what questions will come up.

The Student Room exists as a place for students to engage and support each other and students will naturally want to converse about their revision and school experiences over the next few months. Our Study help forums are there to allow students to do this and we believe conversations relating to the 2019 exam season can be used as part of a students revision and preparation plans. Therefore we will be allowing conversations about students exams to remain on site, and will be allowing previous seasons Unofficial Markschemes to remain also.

It is still against our rules to share the actual papers, and we will remove any requests or offers of this nature.

EH
Go :tsr:

:rave:

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