Petition to stop school's lessons in The Simpsons
More than 400 people have signed a petition calling for a Somerset school to stop teaching the US cartoon series The Simpsons in lessons.
The opening sequence and an episode are being covered in the media module of the course at Kingsmead Community School, in Wiveliscombe.
The school said the show demonstrated use of language in the media.
Parent Joseph Reynolds said it was not the right quality of learning material for his daughter and her classmates.
Mr Reynolds collected signatures for his petition in the local community, but the school's governors upheld the school's decision to continue teaching the cartoon.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-10697272
AS-level maths error: students set impossible question
An "unfortunate error" meant maths students were set a question that was impossible to answer in an AS-level exam.
Just under 6,800 teenagers took the paper - set by the OCR exam body - last Thursday.
OCR has apologised, saying it will make sure candidates are not disadvantaged by the mistake.
But some students writing on social networking sites have been calling for the test to be re-run.
The error was in an exam paper taken in 335 schools and other exam centres in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Stress
The question carried eight marks out of 72 being awarded for the paper.
One candidate Thomas Fay, who contacted the BBC News website said he had been distressed to find a question that appeared "impossible".
"This threw me in the exam and many people found this to cause much added stress in the exam," he added.
"Many people are worried that the mistake made by the examining board will severely affect the mark and grade they achieve in the paper. For many this was a final exam and will most likely influence final grades and university admission."
...
A spokeswoman said: "We very much regret that there was a mistake... and that our quality assurance procedures failed to identify this error.
"Because we have been alerted to this so early, we are able to take this error into account when marking the paper. We will also take it into account when setting the grade boundaries. We have sent a letter to all schools and colleges explaining in more detail what we shall do.
"We do apologise again that this has happened."
The exam body says it is not going to discount the question from the marking, because that might disadvantage candidates who spent a lot of time trying to answer it.
Students will be awarded points for their attempts to work out the question and measures are also in place which are designed to recognise that other candidates may have discovered the error quickly, OCR says.
OCR released full details of the error - on paper "Decision Mathematics 1" - as follows:
The question as printed asked candidates to verify the shortest route, for two given conditions, giving values of 32.4 + 2x km and 34.2 + x km. These values should have been 34.3 + 2x km and 36.1 + x km respectively. The error was not to have included twice the journey between A and B (0.9 km) and the journey between F and G (1.0 km) in the values given.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13627415