GCSE: British students losing marks as they can’t write in full sentences

General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examiners have revealed that students are losing up to 5 per cent of the available marks due to their inability to write in full sentences, using capital letters and basic punctuation.

New marking rules penalise candidates for poor spelling, grammar and punctuation, and have exposed a ‘worrying’ decline in standards among a large number of pupils.

Some of the howlers discovered include the ‘widespread misuse’ of apostrophes, incorrect spellings of words such as volcano, and the use of ‘textspeak’ instead of proper English.