Niets admits to mistakes in English exam

The National Institute of Education Testing Service (Niets) yesterday admitted three mistakes in an English exit exam for middle school students pointed out earlier by an Englishlanguage expert.

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Niets owns up to errors in exam

DUMRONGKIAT MALA

The National Institute of Education Testing Service (Niets) yesterday admitted three mistakes in an English exit exam for middle school students pointed out earlier by an English-language expert.

Speaking at a press briefing yesterday, Niets director Sampan Panpruk said the first mistake was in question No.42 asking students to find a sentence with a similar meaning to “Jimmy was a fruit seller for 10 years”.

The alternatives were: 1) Jimmy is now a fruit seller; 2) Jimmy has been selling fruit for 10 years; 3) Jimmy started selling fruit 10 years ago; or 4) Jimmy is not a fruit seller any more.

Mr Sampan said the right answer is No.4, but the answer key says No.3.

Note from Bangkok Post learning: Actually, even if the question used "similar," none of the answers above are really correct since the sentence tells us nothing about the present. It is easy to think of a situation where Jimmy is a fruit seller, e.g., "Jimmy was a fruit seller for 10 years before he got an office job. Unfortunately, the company went out of business after five years and now he is back to selling fruit."

There were similar mistakes in two other questions. Australian media personality Andrew Biggs earlier last month spotted mistakes in this year’s Ordinary National Educational Test (O-Net) English exam for Mathayom 3 (Grade 9) but Niets repeatedly dismissed his assertions.

According to the Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec), 656,701 students were affected by the errors.

A total of 42,943 students were deducted four points and 175,671 students deducted two points, while 146,534 students were given two additional points, 39,608 students four additional points and 3,965 students six extra points. Another 247,980 students were not affected.

Mr Sampan apologised for the error that affected students who wanted to study in 282 senior high schools considered as highly competitive. Among these 282 schools, O-Net scores count anywhere from 5-20% in their admission systems.

The errors in the English exam seem to have had little impact on the overall O-Net scores, Mr Sampan said.

In the worst case, a student who was given six additional points in the subject would get a 0.24-point increase in overall score, he said.

“However, if that small amount can help some students get into those schools, we must ensure all of them can,” he added. The Niets will fix all the students’ scores in the transcripts by this week.

The new results will be sent to Obec to determine the number of students who took the admission exams and were affected by the errors.

Education Minister Dapong Ratanasuwan said he rejected a resignation letter earlier submitted by Mr Sampan, to take responsibility for the errors that affected the students, saying it was not too serious and the agency needed to improve to prevent such mistakes occurring again.

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