From the London Times:

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote "f*** off" was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.

Mr Buckroyd, chief examiner of English for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), an examination board, said that he had given the pupil two marks, out of a possible 27, for the expletive.

To gain minimum marks in English, students must demonstrate "some simple sequencing of ideas" and "some words in appropriate order." The phrase had achieved this, according to Mr Buckroyd.

The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: "It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for--like conveying some meaning and some spelling."

But seriously--the cursing question sounds like a distraction from the real issue at hand. Check out how officials have responded to Buckroyd's rules, and think about what their response reveals.

The AQA is distancing itself from Buckroyd's remarks, saying that "If a candidate's script contains, for example, obscenities, examiners are instructed to contact AQA's offices, which will advise them in accordance with Joint Council for Qualification guidelines. Expletives in a script would either be disregarded, or sanctioned." That seems fair enough--though it's strange that there is a reporting requirement.

But then consider this: The Joint Council for Examinations actually requires examiners to report "inappropriate, offensive or obscene material" written by examinees, so that it can conduct a follow-up investigation.

I always pause when I encounter educational bureaucrats evincing their seemingly bottomless need to "investigate" and "sanction" "inappropriate" or "offensive" speech. That's the vocabulary of institutionalized intolerance, and it's been abused countless times on campuses where administrators think it's their business to decide some should be punished for expressing views that others dislike.

It would seem here that the Council is interested in adjudicating far more than the use of foul language. It seems to be interested in adjudicating viewpoint as well. In other words, there seems to be a speech code built into the U.K.'s high school qualifying exams. That's the real foul, I would think.