The Good News Is That Students Taking Exams Can No Longer Make Errors,

the bad news is that education chiefs paid costly consultants to find new words for "error" as it is considered "too negative", no, really, with more cash in their hands than ever before, exam watchdog Ofgual — set up to boost public confidence in qualifications — also admitted they avoid talking about the reliability of tests in case it causes bad publicity, the regulator's head of standards, Dennis Opposs, said: "We have worried in the past that negative news stories about reliability could damage public confidence." so this news is not bad publicity for them? a report by the regulator, read out at the conference, said: "It was necessary to choose an alternative term to 'error' as this was too closely associated with culpability, and because it had an unhelpfully subtle word grammar." shrewd consultants eventually decided on "variation" as the best alternative, after "clash" was dismissed for not being close enough in meaning to unreliability, the other piece of bad news is that there are no figures available for how much this farce cost the taxpayers of Great Britain.