'We've lost the papers of two students'
For the first time, the teenagers involved will be told the bad news and offered the chance to resit exam
Two students among the 118,000 picking up their Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination results today will learn that one of their exam papers was lost during marking.
They are the words every student dreads to hear - but the teenagers can be thankful that at least they are being told. Students in their position previously never found out that their result was a 'combined assessment' - an estimated score based on past performance.
The rules were changed after an inquiry by the Ombudsman found 77 exam papers had gone missing in the past five years.
The Ombudsman recommended that students be told if their papers were lost and given the option of sitting the exam again. The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority has agreed to both demands.
The authority is also launching a research and development programme aimed at bringing in an online marking system. Papers would then be taken straight from exam halls to a central point for scanning into a database, reducing the chance of them being lost.
The two students whose papers were lost this year will be offered the option of resitting the missing papers, a Chinese Language Paper One (composition) and an English Language Syllabus A multiple-choice test.
The combined assessment has also been broadened to include marks in related subjects and coursework as well as previous results in the same subject.
To reduce the number of lost papers, the authority ordered all exam centres this year to keep every scrap of waste paper from every exam and store it in a safe place.
Where the number of scripts did not match the number of candidates, authority officers asked schools to search through the waste paper. If they had no success, teams of officers were sent down to conduct the search themselves.
The authority's secretary-general-designate, Peter Hill, said three missing exam papers had turned up in the searches. This was an improvement but the authority was not complacent. 'With over 1 million scripts and over 3,000 markers, things like this are always very complicated and all sorts of things can go wrong,' he said.
'For one of the candidates, it was a case in which the marker had reported the mark but then subsequently lost the script. So we will be able to give her proper mark - and it was a good one - but we will also give the option of a resit.'
Mr Hill said that next year scripts would be recorded whenever they were sent from the authority to a marker and back again, in a bid to cut down on papers being lost.
