In the biggest security blunder in years, an exam superintendent in Drogheda distributed the wrong English paper to students last year, forcing the rescheduling of the exam at a cost of over €1 million. Can a similar mistake be prevented this year?

THE TEXTS were the earliest sign that something was amiss.

It was June 3rd, 2009, and students had just completed their first exam – English paper 1 – when rumours began to spread that a group of students had caught a glimpse of the second English paper that everyone was due to sit the following day.

Scepticism was the first reaction. Rumoured “leaks” happen all the time, turning out to be nothing more than educated guesses about what’s on the paper, but this one persisted, filtering its way through Facebook and Bebo throughout the afternoon.

By 4pm, the news had hit the widely used boards.ie. Students still didn’t know what to believe. One of the first posters to relay news of the leak went to the trouble of inserting a health warning: “Again I’ll say it, [my] bull**** detector is ringing like crazy at the mo.”

By the time the tips made it to Twitter however, the story was gaining credence and the content of paper 2 was being passed around in bullet-point form. “Deception, Cultural Context, Keats, Longley, Walcott,” was one brief but helpful tweet.

It had all started early that morning in St Oliver’s Community School in Drogheda. As students waited nervously to begin their exam, the exam superintendent opened a set of papers and distributed them to the students.

As the students turned them over and flicked through, it quickly became apparent that they had been given English paper 2 rather than the scheduled paper 1. The superintendent immediately ordered students to turn the papers over, and collected them, before distributing the correct exam. The candidates had possession of the paper for less than 30 seconds.

Why the superintendent didn’t immediately inform the school of what had happened is still unclear.

The brevity of the incident has been verified, so most likely he thought he had averted disaster. He had retired. Maybe he underestimated the speed-reading abilities of teenagers and the potential for word to spread.

Whatever the case, it was a number of parents who, on realising what had happened, informed the school principal of the incident, and at 3.55pm he placed a call to the State Examinations Commission (SEC).

It was director of operations Aidan Farrell who took the call.

“I asked the principal to go back and check with the parents precisely what it was the students had seen,” says Farrell.

“The principal came back and was able to name a number of the poets on the paper and the theme of the Macbeth question. We realised there had indeed been a breach.”

SEC officials then began monitoring social networking sites, where word was spreading like wildfire. At this point, boards.ie was overrun with more than 1,400 users simultaneously logged on at one point.

“It was clear that the breach was significant,” Farrell says. “We decided that it was necessary to use our alternative or contingency paper.”

For every exam, two papers are written. One becomes the exam, the other is the back-up plan. The problem was that by this stage it was 5.30pm, and the contingency papers were in Athlone. Farrell and his team explored the possibility of getting the papers, with the correct number of ordinary and higher level papers, to each one of the 2,500 exam centres by the following morning.

“An Post were in a position to guarantee us delivery to most of the examination centres by the following morning, but they could not guarantee it for everybody,” Farrell says.

“There was no room for error. A 90 per cent success rate wasn’t good enough. There was also a risk involved in sending out the contingency paper while the original paper was in circulation, as the two could be confused by superintendents . . . We had to have 100 per cent success on this one.”

Eventually the decision was taken to reschedule the exam for Saturday morning – much to the consternation of students and parents.

A report on the incident found human error rather than a systems failure was to blame for what had happened.

It did make recommendations about how such an incident could be prevented in future, however, and the SEC has now overhauled the checks and balances that are in place to prevent such a situation ever occurring again.

Essentially, the processes that exam superintendents must now go through in order to ensure they have the correct exam paper packet are more stringent than before. Previously a superintendent would go through a series of checks themselves and then when they reached the exam hall some students would be asked to confirm that the exam packet was indeed the correct one before the superintendent opened the packet and distributed the papers. “We felt that it was perhaps too much to ask of exam candidates,” says Farrell.

Now, the superintendent will partner with a colleague in a location and run through a series of checks before entering the exam hall.

The fact that replacement papers could not be distributed in time for the following day after last year’s breach has not been forgotten, but the contingency arrangements for exams are still being developed.

Farrell is confident that enough precautions have been put in place to prevent history repeating itself. “It’s impossible to reduce all risk of something happening, but we have done our best,” he says.

The SEC has introduced measures that will hopefully mean a leak like last year’s cannot happen again.

Colour coding:The packets in which the exams are sealed are colour coded. Morning papers are in green packets, afternoon papers are in orange.

Any exam with two papers will be split between morning and afternoon. If paper 1 is scheduled for a morning, paper 2 will fall on an afternoon, and vice versa. This will minimise the potential for confusion between paper 1 and paper 2.

New validation arrangements: Last year, the superintendent would check the exam packet against the timetable and then exam candidates would be asked to confirm that the papers in the exam packet corresponded to the exam they were about to sit.

This year, the superintendent partners with another superintendent, and they each go through a process to check each other’s exam packets before the examination starts.

More security: The packet is not opened until the superintendent reaches the examination centre. An exam candidate will be asked to confirm the packet seal is intact. Once the packet has been opened, superintendents must then check that every paper in the packet is correct.

Facing up:Exam papers will be distributed face up. Up to last year they were distributed face down, which is why the error in Drogheda was only realised after the papers had been distributed and students had been given the go ahead to turn them over.

Better training: A new DVD details all of the new procedures. Instruction booklets for superintendents have also been revised and a set of key rules made available.

Phone a friend:A free-phone number has been set up for superintendents. They are encouraged to call it if anything happens that could threaten the integrity of the exam.