By Hannah Graham

There has been outrage among year 11s who are waiting for their GCSE results as examiners from exam board AQA have revealed they were not able to use the online marking system provided by AQA for two whole days whilst it crashed, leaving examiners, most of whom are teachers, frustrated and behind on marking.

They took to social media to express their concerns regarding the online system, claiming it had been down for a number of days which resulted in valuable time being lost and some examiners asking AQA for extended deadlines due to the inconvenience.

This comes after a reported attack to the system in April, which meant the personal details of 64,000 examiners had been hacked.

A spokesperson for AQA said: “One of our marking systems is running slower than we’d like and we’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused some of our examiners.”

This has caused stress and worry amongst teens anxiously awaiting their results as there have been a number of mistakes within the exams already – the most catastrophic of which being the OCR English literature exam, which featured an error on the Romeo and Juliet question.

I, myself, had 29 exams in total, including nine hours of science exams.

This doesn’t take into account the extra problems encountered when mistakes are caused by the people that thousands of year 11s and schools are putting their trust in to carry out the exams.

With this period being so stressful – and with stories such as the failure of AQA’s online marking system adding to the torment that young people will inevitably be facing – it is important for young people to look after their mental health.