ETS apologises for online marking blunders – again

Did they sub it out to the lowest bidder, perchance?

Because that's usually what "lengthy procurement process" means.

@ Evil Graham

Yup, ETS was the cheapest proposal, but apparently still "checked all the right boxes"...

Cheapest option

Boston said the company had not been sacked because of the contract QCA had signed with them and defended the decision to award the contract to ETS.

"The company were selected competitively... they were the lowest price but they ticked all the boxes on all the other criteria.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2291082,00.html

Lowest bidder?

So now instead of Education, Education, Education it's "make a savin', make a savin', make a savin'"?

I mean come on. Surely someone must have seen the system they were using and decided that it probably wasn't the best to use. Or did they just position themselves correctly and drop the price?

For once, "think of the children" is a serious comment- crap or missing results have long term implications on a childs' ability to, for example, get a job or get into further/higher education. I wonder how many of them have failed to get a place in uni because of these delays compared with their Scottish/ privately assessed / foreign competitors?

From the guardian article referenced above:

""They are a very big international company. They were checked out for financial due diligence with PWC, we checked major references for them with big assessment work they'd done overseas and they passed muster"

Which means that they're definately profitable and not likely to go under in 5 years. Neither's Red Hat or MacDonalds, but you don't see them wading into the exam-marking business. Simply being profitable doesn't mean they'll be any good- as the dabacle in 2006 showed.

"On this basis they've not delivered. They have a contract for five years so that's the difficulty... we cannot have next year a repeat of what happened this year. It has to be addressed.""

There's no service level agreement or anti-screwup clause in the contract? No way of shimmying yourselves out of your obligations to keep paying them, at least?

We can but hope that they learn from their mistakes and improve the system for the next 4 years.

@Chris Morrison

It sounds as though they forgot to put an important box on the form if ETS ticked all the right ones that were there.

think of the children

Except for when you actually have to spend money ,.

In th old days...

...the Cambridge Examination Board ran exams throughout the former empire and got the papers marked and the results collated in ample time for the students to deal with their next year's schooling. This was in the days when air-freight was limited to gold ingots and single sheets of paper !!

This bunch of clowns can't even deal with the exam papers from one lousy, little country !!

Forget about going to Third-world countries to look for corruption. There's cronyism enough here in Britain. More to come from Red Ken's London now that Big Boris is in charge !!