Tag Archives: exams

All together now – Weeknote #32 – 11th October 2019

Birmingham
Birmingham

A busy week with travels to Bristol, Reading and Birmingham this week.

Monday I was in Bristol for a meeting with the Office for Students, one of the funders of Jisc. Following that I was back in the main office for further meetings.

There was an interesting long read on the Guardian website.

‘The way universities are run is making us ill’: inside the student mental health crisis

A surge in anxiety and stress is sweeping UK campuses. What is troubling students, and is it the universities’ job to fix it?

We know that there is a student mental health crisis and the reasons for this aren’t necessarily clear. We know there has been increase in the demand for mental health services at universities. The article notes that there has been research into the causes of this, but lays the blame for the crisis on the way in which universities are managed and run, leading to students not being in control of what they do and saddled with debt.

Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay
Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

Continue reading All together now – Weeknote #32 – 11th October 2019

Free past papers now available online

Not only can you download the OCR past papers, you can also now upload them to your institutional intranet or VLE.

OCR has begun the first stage of a planned release of free past papers onto the website.

In response to your feedback, we have published 1,000 free-to-download 2006 past papers, mark schemes and examiner reports. There are a few exceptions where we cannot secure copyright, but the majority of qualifications are now covered.

We have also published more than 100 of our papers from 2007, with more due online soon.

OCR’s revised policy means that, in future, many more question papers will be published on the website after each exam series.

Once published online, the papers will remain available for at least two years. Again, you can download all these papers free of charge.

Please view the past papers page for details of the documents available to download.

Laptops in exams?

With the A Level results last week and the GCSE results this week, it reminded me of how we use learning technologies to support and enhance teaching and learning, but when it comes to assessment, we almost always rely on pen paper and those dreaded exam conditions.

BBC news had an interesting opinion piece on whether learners should be able to bring laptops into (some) exams in order to be able to use the internet.

Open your laptops and begin…

Traditional exams also don’t allow for collaboration, working together, teamwork; all things which are essential in the workplace and for life in general.

What do you think?