Teens being misled by TikTok exam paper predictions

Teachers are warning that teenagers are being seduced by TikTok influencers predicting what will be on their GCSE or A-level exam papers — and often getting it wrong.

- Anna Fazackerly

The high-stakes summer exams are now in full swing, and schools say they are having to work harder than ever to counter the influence of social media videos offering enticing revision shortcuts, some of which have more than 100,000 likes.

Clicking on a video on revision techniques can prompt algorithms to direct students to influencers - some of them current or former teachers - to question predictions that look legitimate but are really guesses, one senior teacher said.

"The pupils who come unstuck are those who go in hard on revising only what some TikTok 'expert' says will come up," said Thomas Michael, deputy safeguarding lead at a secondary school in the West Midlands.

Last week a sixth-former currently sitting his A-levels tried to persuade Michael that the predictions he had seen online were reliable as they were based on probability and an analysis of past papers. "I told him to ignore this person and just revise everything," he said.