Just when you thought this IELTS screw-up would blow over, the right wing press has decided to sink its teeth into the matter.
Says the Telegraph:
“Thousands of migrants may have been given visas despite failing mandatory English language tests following a blunder over marking, The Telegraph has learnt.
Up to 80,000 people sitting a language test run by the British Council were given the wrong results, meaning many of them were given pass marks even though they had failed.
Separately, evidence of cheating has been discovered in China, Bangladesh and Vietnam, where criminals sell leaked test papers to migrants so that they know the answers in advance.
It means students, NHS workers and other migrants with a poor grasp of English have been given study or work visas to which they were not entitled.”
And also:
“Because it took so long to discover the problem, many people who were wrongly told they had passed would have been able to obtain visas and come to Britain legally.”
That’s all sort of true, though unmentioned is the fact that a majority of the people who got incorrect scores likely used them to head to Canada, Australia and other places. Or that many IELTS tests are used for domestic purposes. And the fact that the British Council runs the test in partnership with a few other parties.
In any case, it isn’t a great situation. And the IELTS partners could do better in terms of transparency. For the record, here (once again) are the questions I would ask the partners if I were a real journalist:
- What exactly was the problem?
- Exactly how many tests were affected by this problem? “Less than 1%” could mean anywhere from 1 to 70,000 tests.
- Were any administrations from before August 2023 impacted by the problem? IELTS has contacted test takers who must be given new score reports. But what of test takers whose results have expired since they took the test? Did any of them receive incorrect scores?
- Are there any instances where a test was incorrectly scored, but a band score change was not necessary (and, by extension, the test taker was not contacted)? If so, how many? And if so, were these included in the “less than 1%” figure given to score users?