SOME British students sitting English GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) are unable to spell words they are expected to have mastered in primary school, the Daily Mail has reported.

Researchers from Cambridge Assessment, Europe’s largest assessment agency, studied the spelling mistakes found in 60 GCSE English exam scripts. They found that while 97 percent of words were spelled correctly, many GCSE candidates were unable to spell basic words.

The most common mistakes involved uncertainty over double letters. Pupils wrote “always” as “allways”, “quietly” as “quiettly” and “until” as “untill”. It was common for them to confuse identical sounding words, like “know” and “no” and “their” and “there”. Some were unsure about when “h” followed “w”, using phrases such as “I whant”, “he whas” and “we where”.

The most errors involved multiple misspellings. These included constructions such as “nieghbor”, which the researchers described as “all the right letters, just not necessarily in the right order”.

The researchers also found that some mistakes reflected pupils’ speech patterns. They ended words with “ink” rather than “ing”. Where words were even more extremely mangled — “nufse” (nervous), “faunt” (thought) or “torck” (talk) — the researchers suggested they may be caused by dyslexia.

Ian McNeilly of the UK National Association for the Teaching of English, points out that it is possible to achieve high grades in an exam with poor spelling. Many teachers therefore overlook spelling in favor of grade-inflating skills. “I’m not saying that we make spelling a huge priority over understanding, analysis and interpretation,” he said. “But students should be able to spell securely. It’s an ongoing battle.”