Over the last couple of years I’ve written a couple of blog posts that I end up referring people to when faced with queries just to save myself repeating myself and this is one of them .. to be honest this one has been in my draft folder and I’m trying to edit and then publish it after an email from someone (let’s just call her … umm … “F” … **waves**) pointing out something that I know contradicts something else.

Arggghh!! that doesn’t even make any sense so lets just start with the original post:

Before anyone says: “you know you shouldn’t see the paper until the day after the exam!” or “Your schools sooo wrong by letting you see the paper after the exam” … or similar nonsense. Let me just say, whilst muttering “Bullsh1t” under my breath you need to read page 69 from the JCQ document:  “Instructions for Conducting Exams 2016-2017 (downloaded 21st May 2017) ” which can be found on the JCQ site which basically means that you aren’t contravening any guidelines as long as everyone in your centre has finished the exam or its after the end of the published finish time.

I know why we want to see the papers. I’m the worst for wanting to have a gander when I’ve been allowed .. but what I’d say is that there are people who may have varied the start time and who may be sitting the papers in International centres (does that even still happen??) so can we not give anyone an unfair advantage by “tweeting or facebooking” questions until later (late!) in the day! Just use your common sense .. we are professionals after all! With that in mind can I suggest that whilst you are able to see them you will have an exams officer who wants to get the scripts packed up and dispatched and also may be having to get ready for the next exam so be mindful of this! Don’t be demanding them!

The above refers to the General Regulations for Approved Centres 2016-2017 so I thought I’d make sure that there isn’t some contradiction there either and that says basically the same:

So why’s some of the text in yellow?? yeah I was curious about that too and at the front of the document is this that implies that this is a change from previous years :

Every year we get the same old thing about whether “we” (teachers I mean) can or can’t see papers after the exams and so I thought that maybe this was a change – it’s in yellow after all, so I went back to the Instructions for Conducting exams for 2015-2916 and found this

This then isn’t new this year – nothing has changed so why will there still be comments flying around Twitter like the ones I started this blog post with?  If we’ve been able to get hold of them on the day of the exam for at least 2 years (I can’t be bothered going back any further) …. then why does the JCQ on their page “The Life of a Script” have a document -> The life of a script diagram v5.1 JCQ 21-5-17  that is the below image … obviously without the oval and my “hmmm”.

It begs the question as to how we can have information like this that isn’t checked for correctness whenever there is a change to the overriding regulations? Come on JCQ!!  

So I’ll finish with this: we have no right to do anything in school .. but there certainly isn’t a regulation forbidding you from seeing the papers until 24 hours later! FACT!!