Free exam marking you say?

A guest article by Penelope Shortland Palmer.

This time last year we waved goodbye to our year eleven and thirteen cohorts in new and mysterious circumstances, secure in the knowledge they had done everything they needed to and that we had all the data we needed to make secure grade judgements about those students.  What followed was a bizarre fiasco in which grades were given, then ripped up and replaced, then ripped up and replaced again.  Despite the relative security of those grades, there was no agreement on whether the outcomes were valid or not.  

This year, the situation is completely different.  Instead of saying goodbye to our students we now have no leaving date and no idea when they might finally graduate.  Instead of secure grades we have a completely random selection of assessment types and criteria, many of which have been published by the exam boards so there is not a ‘blind’ exam or question in sight.  Some schools are using the exam board materials but the vast majority are left wondering why they even bothered to produce them as with publication, having a fair assessment becomes impossible. We are therefore left with even more work, to produce both an assessment and a fair criteria.  This is replicated in thousands of schools up and down the country and, compared to last year, there is no ability within the system to standardise anything about the outcomes.  So what will happen and who is going to do all the work?

For the last ten years I have marked for one of the major exam boards and I have been paid the equivalent of ￡5 per script for this process.  This year, I am marking two year eleven classes of assessment. In the absence of formal exams we have opted for three formal assessments of 30 marks each plus 3 assessed pieces of work at 30 marks each.  This is a total marking load of 180 marks per student which adds up to 10,800 marks.  Given that the end of year exam I used to mark was 75 marks, this works out to the equivalent of 144 paid scripts. If I was being paid for this it would be ￡720 worth of work.  Of course, none of us are being paid for it.  On top of this, we have catch up sessions to run for KS3 for the ‘lost generation’, endless assessment to ‘identify gaps’ from lockdown and not a single extra hour in which to do it because the classes are full of year eleven and thirteen students who are also being taught full time in a frantic revision cycle to prepare for the assessments. 

We will then have to standardise these internally. As a comparison, moderating our coursework this year took 5 hours for the A Level cohort.  This is an utterly unsustainable model and will potentially create a nationwide collapse of reliability in outcomes for the cohort.  Months of prevaricating, late and poor decisions have left an entire year group entirely unsure of what they need to do to achieve the grades they deserve and the teachers that need to provide them on their knees in exhaustion.  Something needs to change.

P. Shortland-Palmer