A secondary school maths teacher has highlighted a past AQA GCSE exam question that many students commonly get wrong. The puzzle is straightforward to solve but easy to misread under pressure.
The Question That Trips Students Up
The past AQA exam paper question reads: "A bag contains 72 blue beads and some red beads. Blue beads : red beads = 4:5. Work out the number of red beads."
Teacher Natasha Hall explained the common error. "Most people read this as meaning that there are 72 beads and so they add up the two ratios and divide 72 by 9 (4 + 5). 72 divides by 9 to give 8 and then 8 × 5 (number of red beads) = 40," she said.
The Correct Method
"However, if you re-read the question it says there are 72 BLUE beads. So the correct method is to divide 72 by 4 (number of blue beads) to get 18 and then multiply 18 × 5 to get the correct answer, 90," Hall added.
The trick is to read the question carefully. Working under pressure can lead to mistakes.
Exam Board Errors
In June this year, an exam board issued an apology after discovering mistakes in "all versions" of a GCSE science paper. Tes magazine reported that England's largest exam board, AQA, apologised for the blunder and flagged the error to exams regulator Ofqual.
Michael Turner, the exam board's chief commercial officer, stressed that AQA "has processes in place to make sure that no learners are disadvantaged by it." He stated in an email sent to exams officers: "We're sorry to let you know that there was a mistake on all versions of the GCSE Combined Science Trilogy higher paper 2, which students sat on Monday 15 June 2026."
Within one of the paper's questions, students were instructed to "calculate the mass of a system," but the answer prompt stated "mass of glider" – which would only make up a portion of the system.
It marked the second such mistake in just over a week. Pupils taking a foundation-tier GCSE maths paper earlier that month opened their sealed examination papers only to find an insert containing information meant for a different paper.
One teacher told Tes that schools had received no communication from AQA regarding the incorrect inserts, stating: "In this series of exams we've had two erratum notices for minor typos (geography and physics) but nothing at all for this. Schools only found out via text and email from colleagues working elsewhere."
The teacher added: "Exams officers downloaded new inserts and rushed to print them. Some disruption to smooth starts, but exams started within the rules - still nothing from AQA now."
