Identification of pupils and exams

Identification of pupils and exams

This the beginning of a series of blogs about Identification of pupils and exams. Along with the challenge that schools and colleges have with teaching they also have to put on exams for a wide range of pupils and candidates requirements. With more or less of an understanding of who each pupil is as some pupils return for resits and others join just for the exam.

Historically schools have played the key role in identification checks for pupils. The shear length of school means that schools have an intimate understanding of the pupil and so have no problem with the implicate understanding who each pupil is.

- So identification checks for pupils before exams were done implicitly by knowing the pupil. Teachers and parents have a relationship with feedback and parent teacher meetings.

For outside of school exam providers and pupils returning to schools teachers are under pressure to identification checks for these new or returning pupils who sit the exams.

On top of this is the fact that the majority of pupils in secondary school do not have photo identification documents.

Thankfully there has up to now been little reported fraud for public exams like GCSE and A levels. The numbers are small as a reflection on the number of pupils who take exams in places that do not have a relationship with are also small. However, In a time of coronovirus and the rush to take exams, pupils will seek to take exams away from the school they learned from as they would have left the school they were attending. In centres like the Exam House. These exam centres do not have the long term relationship with pupils. So identification checks for pupils and candidates are increasingly becoming important. The most obvious exam fraud is a person claims to the person who should be sitting the exam and is taking the exam on behalf of someone else. By leveraging the pressure the exams officer is under to produce the exam on time. The challenge is often administrators of schools and exam centres have a pressurised job just putting on exams in a busy exam hall. Getting the administrators and examination officers to worry about identification checks for pupils on the door of the exam adds another level of bureaucracy and stress. The likelihood is this type of fraud is set to rise as the Coronovirus will mean a lot of candidates will be determined to sit exams away from the school the studied at. To avoid this fraud exam officers need to produce as much opportunity for the candidate to show their photo ID before the day of the exams and then again when they arrive at the exam. The Gov. have different levels of ID checks including birth certificates. However, it is a fact that identification checks for pupils and young people is hard. We will investigate further solutions that are already with us that might hold part of the answer.