So allow me to share with you an e-mail I received from a GCSE examiner earlier this summer. "A* grades are given out like sweets at a children's party to youths who not only cannot spell or punctuate to save their lives, but who cannot do something much simpler than that, namely copy words which are printed infront of them," he writes. "I marked nearly a thousand English Literature papers. Of those, over a hundred wrote 'Literature' wrongly (e.g. litriture) on the front of their answer-sheet, in spite of the fact that it was there in big letters on the question paper.
"I marked approximately 700 essays on An Inspector Calls, by J.B. Priestley. The candidates had the book with them in the exam-room, and the name Priestley is in large letters on the front of the book. It was also printed as part of the wording of the questions. Yet over 95 per cent of my candidates wrote either Priestly or Preistly."

A similar number misspelt the characters' names Sheila and Arthur. "Yet these words are printed on almost every page of the text which they have on their desk."

He continues: "I was also forced to award ludicrously high marks to candidates whose command of English grammar and/or sentence structure was simply non-existent. Upwards of 150 candidates will have been awarded a C (or better) who wrote 'could of', 'might of', 'should of'. The pronouns I and me were used interchangeably by large numbers of candidates (as in 'Me and Mr Birling have done nothing wrong' or 'The Inspector was so rude to Mr Birling and I'). Neighbours-speak was quite common, as in 'Then Sheila [sic] was like, what?' (meaning she was surprised, I supposed)."

The examiner was not allowed to penalise such basic errors. "I don't want to award A* in a subject called 'English Literature' o a person who knows no English and cannot spell Literature even though it's printed in front of him/her. And yet I had to, again and again and again. I was told repeatedly, explicitly, and unambigyously, that I was to mark only the ideas expressed, and not -- not even a tiny bit -- the way in which those ideas were presented." The instructions given to him by the examining board read: "There is NO Assessment of Written Communication on this paper".