A REVIEW of GCSEs has been launched by the Government’s examination watchdog amid concern over the grading of papers by England’s three exam boards.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is investigating apparent discrepancies in the award of grades in modern foreign languages.

The inquiry is looking in particular at variations in the award of C and D grades, regarded as the threshold of a good GCSE pass.

It follows complaints from teachers two years ago that some borderline C candidates were being unfairly downgraded in French and German. More than a third of secondary schools in Lancashire also said that grades last year were below their expectations.

There were 318,000 candidates for GCSE French last year and 122,000 in German with the three boards, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR), and Edexcel.

Almost 67,000 entries in French were awarded a C — 21 per cent of candidates — and just over 57,000, or 18 per cent, gained a D grade. In German, 31,300 candidates, or almost 26 per cent, were awarded a C grade while 19,800, or 16 per cent, received a D.

News of the investigation emerged less than a week before results of this year’s exams are issued to almost 600,000 students.

The QCA said that it had commissioned two analyses of the standards used by the three boards in setting grade boundaries. A spokesman said that its inquiry was confined to modern languages, which faced particular challenges in maintaining standards across the different boards.

“We try to maintain comparability between awarding bodies and over time across different subjects. It is important that awarding body standards are maintained over time,” he said.

The spokesman said that it had discussed initial findings from its inquiry with the three boards, but declined to give details until the completion of a full review before the 2006 exams.

Officials at QCA planned to carry out further research into the way the boards awarded grades to students in this summer’s exams.

A separate study of GCSE French published by QCA in 2003 found differences in the difficulty of questions set by the exam boards. It concluded that students taking higher-tier papers with OCR faced the most demanding questions, while the AQA’s syllabus was the least challenging.

Concerns about GCSE grading come three years after a debacle over A-level results which prompted a review of exams taken by 100,000 students. It will fuel criticism that having more than one exam board makes it difficult for regulators to maintain standards.

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