How examiners ensure all their marks make the grade
This year, students in Wales were entered for more than 400,000 GCSE, AS and A-level qualifications. Jo Richards, of Qualifications Wales, explains what happens after students sit their exams
For students, the summer holidays are here, the exams are over and it’s time for a wellearned break from their studies.
But for exam boards, the pressure is on. This is the busiest time of year for them. They have a mammoth job to manage and the clock is ticking.
This year, students in Wales were entered for more than 400,000 GCSE, AS and A-level qualifications. That amounts to more than a million exam scripts and coursework tasks.
Exam boards have just a few short weeks to make sure they get all these marked accurately, consistently and in time for each qualification to be awarded (which is when they set this year’s grade boundaries – the minimum marks needed for each grade).
Finally, they’ve got to process the marks for each candidate and send the grades to schools by results day.
What happens after students sit their exams?
At the end of the exam, invigilators in the exam hall securely pack the completed answer booklets (we call them “scripts”) and send them to the exam board to be marked. Scripts marked on-screen are sent to a secure scanning facility before being sent to examiners digitally. Traditionally marked scripts are sent directly to the examiner marking them. Who marks the exams? Every single examiner who marks for WJEC is a qualified teacher with a minimum of a year’s teaching experience. Many are practising teachers who make time to mark exams on top of their other commitments.
There are lots of reasons why teachers choose to be examiners. They get a better insight into the qualification and how it’s assessed, as well as deeper understanding of assessment. It’s also a good way to meet and make links with others who teach their subject, which helps them develop their teaching. All examiners receive face-to-face training on how to apply the mark scheme for the questions they will be marking. The mark scheme is written by the principal examiner for the exam board and gives detailed guidance and sample answers for each question in the exam paper.
Do all examiners give the same marks?
Before marking begins, the senior examiners who wrote the question papers bring all the other examiners together. They spend a day carefully reviewing and discussing the mark scheme and making sure they can all apply it consistently to a sample of answers given by this year’s students. During marking, each examiner is spot-checked to make sure they are marking accurately and consistently.
In recent years, advancements in technology have meant that more and more marking is now done onscreen. This allows exam boards to monitor the quality of marking more effectively. Every so often examiners are given a question to mark that has already been marked by a senior examiner. They can’t see which questions these are, but if their marking differs from the senior examiner, they will either be retrained or they can be stopped from marking altogether. When this happens, the questions they have marked are reallocated to a different examiner. With on-screen marking, an examiner marks specific questions. This means they don’t mark all the answers given by a single student. It also means the students entered by one school or college won’t all be marked by the same examiner. How is coursework marked? Coursework is marked by teachers using assessment criteria set by an exam board. The school is responsible for making sure its teachers mark consistently. The exam board randomly selects a sample of marked work from each school. A moderator (another name for an examiner) checks that the school has applied the assessment criteria correctly and consistently. If a school has marked generously or severely, all its students’ marks may be adjusted up or down. If a school’s marks are inconsistent, the exam board may decide to remark all students’ work. How are grades awarded? When the marking’s done, a group of senior examiners for each subject, the awarding committee, meet to decide on the minimum marks needed for each grade – these are called grade boundaries. The exact mark at which a grade boundary is set can vary from year to year, depending on a range of factors. including the standard of this year’s answers compared to the standard of last year’s answers and statistical evidence about how this year’s students compare overall to previous years.
To find out more about how grade boundaries are set, what happens when new qualifications are introduced and what to look out for in this summer’s results, visit our website (qualificationswales.org) and click on “summer exams 2017”. There you’ll find some short articles on all these topics and more.
Jo Richards is executive director (regulation) at Qualifications Wales.