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News Interview - 203 candidates; 90 passed - 44%

This was a story about a road accident, but two angles distinguished it from so many other accident stories. Drugs with a street value of £55,000 were found in one of the cars involved, a Vauxhall Cavalier. The other vehicle was a police car on an unrelated 999 call.

The driver of the drugs car apparently panicked when he saw the police car coming towards him with its blue warning light flashing and zigzagged into a stone wall. The police car swerved to avoid a collision and ran into a traffic light. The Cavalier driver died and the officer in the police car was injured.

There were plenty of useful leads in a statement that the head of Oxdown CID, Det Chief Supt Poynter, was prepared to make at the start of each interview, so there was no excuse for candidates not developing these angles.

Why, then, were the results in this exam disappointing yet again?

Most candidates rightly highlighted the drugs angle in their intros, but surprisingly a few forgot to ask the police chief for an estimate of the street value - a figure with obvious headline potential.

Many did not put this drugs haul into perspective (it was Oxdown's second largest). Some forgot to name the drugs or the quantity (13 kilos of cannabis resin and 1,000 Ecstasy tablets), and the majority failed to say where it was thought the drugs were bound - speculation, of course, but a useful quote.

In many stories, the description of what happened in the accident was inadequate or misleading. A few even had the cars travelling in the wrong direction.

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