Electronic tags used to beat the A-level cheats
Friday, 11 May 2007
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Exam papers will be tagged this summer in a crackdown on cheating, one of the country's biggest exam boards reveals today.
Edexcel, which marks 13 million question papers a year, will install a radio-controlled device in bags of exam papers held by schools.
The tag will tell it how many papers should be inside and whether there has been an attempt to open the bag before the exam starts.
In addition, the board's name is written in microtext (invisible to the naked eye but detectable through a special magnifying device) around individual papers, to deter photocopying of the paper - and its sale on the open market. A paper can fetch £200 the day before an exam, officials said.
The crackdown follows the discovery of a theft of an A-level maths paper last summer. The board said there had been 70 reported breaches of security during last summer's GCSE, AS and A-level papers.
Jerry Jarvis, Edexcel's managing director, said: "My main message is if you're going to cheat, I'm going to catch you. I don't want to catch you, but I do want to deter you from cheating."
Next year, Edexcel plans to step up the security with locking boxes for exam papers. These can only be opened through radio instructions delivered using a mobile phone - allowing Edexcel to open the bags at the appropriate time from its headquarters.
The exam board says it is also taking measures to crack down on plagiarism. Measures include checking the seating layout in exam halls to identify copying, and comparing results against predicted grades.
