Exam board tags papers to deter cheats

LONDON, May 12 (Reuters) Students taking GCSE and A-level exams this month were warned that they would be caught if they bought stolen papers.

Exam board Edexcel said yesterday they had put shop-style security tags into the packages of papers sent to schools and colleges to trace any that went missing.

Examiners would also be able to spot unexpectedly good performances by individual students or groups of candidates by comparing their results with their achievements in other subjects and over previous years.

''I want to raise the belief in students that if you cheat you will get caught,'' Edexcel Managing Director Jerry Jarvis told BBC radio.

''We are going to be able to track very precisely exactly where every paper is going, using a radio frequency tagging system.

''That enables us to track the source of the leak very quickly when a paper comes to light.'' The exam board said there were 70 reports of security breaches last summer, including the theft of an A-level statistics paper, out of the 620,000 packages of papers it despatched.

In 2004, maths, chemistry and biology A-level papers were stolen from a college safe in northwest London, photocopied and offered for sale to pupils.

The year before a teacher at a south London school was jailed for three months after being convicted of stealing five GCSE papers.

The board said the exam papers would also be packed in secure bags which would show if they had been opened ahead of time.

It said 90 percent of candidate scripts would be scanned into computers, enabling senior examiners quickly to check the work of any students whose submissions were suspect.

REUTERS NC HT0912