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Teaching Quality Assurance assessors found exam questions "insufficiently challenging" and said the same questions were repeated year on year ("Flaws in marking revealed by QAA", February 20). Could these competent academics have overlooked the obvious? It is more challenging to find an original way of answering a well-known question than to apply routine techniques to an unseen problem.

We teach our students to question their assumptions: in nine long years, was it too much to hope that the TQA assessors could have learnt to be equally self-critical?

Julian Newman
Glasgow Caledonian University