Exam marking fair pay?

I don't do it any more. It simply doesn't pay enough for the stress.

The board I was working for required the equivalent of a full week's work before you were actually paid anything (there's compulsory e safety and child protection training and qualification scripts before you even get to the standardisation).

It was below minimum wage once you included that.

Um I'm doing this wrong. My exam board don't pay for the standardisation pre marking (I don't think) and I don't earn that much an hour....

Having said that I'm teaching out of school and my annual rate is dire.

I'm so doing this wrong. I actually thought you weren't doing too bad in your OP!! My fear had been whether I was doing it for under minimum wage...

It is really good experience for me in my subject. And I currently need to the extraoney - it can be done on top of working.

But I so need a better job.

Agree with this too. It’s even poor COD now as the only comms you have is with the team leader. I would rather wait for the examiner’s report.

We are “encouraged” to mark by our HT for CPD so I can imagine in the future, this will become the ethos. I always say no.

I used to mark but no longer do. The pay is poor for the stress and these days my time is worth more to me. Marking used to pay for my summer holidays but it doesn’t even do that now!

It is also worth pointing out that pre Covid, the exam board paid for travel and hotel to attend in person standardisation meetings. Post-covid, the meetings went online. This year, in my subject, the meeting was done away with and we now have online standardisation - they send the mark scheme, you do a practise set of questions which have comments and then you do a few more to check you’re in line a off you go. No opportunity to discuss anything, no mark scheme tweaking as a team when working through practise questions, just get on with it. It will be my last year. It has been massively valuable CPD over the years but it’s reduced to slave labour and huge uncertainty. We should be appalled.

I agree with you OP, it should be doubled at the very least!

Don't forget that's it's a zero hours contract and markers have no guarantee of work.

Another exam board put marker fees up by 2% this year "in line with inflation " whilst at the same time putting up the cost to sit the exam by an average of about 14%.

Someone above the markers is getting an above inflation pay rise.

The pay is not enough for what is expected, like most positions in education.

I just got paid £53 for standardisation. It took a whole day and was a very stressful process, needing a lot of concentration. Less than minimum wage. I've been doing this for years, but I'm out. Especially as they hassle you on Christmas Day about accepting the contract.🙄

I am doing exam making this year for GCSE. I get paid just over £6 per paper and each paper consists of 3 essays. Even marking at top speed, I can only mark 4 or 5 papers per hour, so the hourly pay works out at about £27 gross. As a teacher of 22 years’ experience, that’s not great pay!!

The pay is low and there is a shortage as most actual teachers are absolutely knackered with no spare time

I marked a new exam 6 years ago. I don't teach it and I made a mistake on one of the questions. My team leader also didn't pick up my error. Every paper I'd marked had to be remarked by the exam board.

I've been invited to mark this paper every year since. I've turned it down. I did a bad job and didn't really get any advice about what I'd done wrong (didn't even clearly know which question).

This year, I'd turned down the invitation as usual. But they begged me to take it on again due to an extreme shortage of examiners. So they've had someone marking this paper that has a really bad track record (I also do other exams, which I'm skilled at).

Low pay doesn't get good quality workers. My usual hourly rate is 5 times the hourly rate I get for examining. I continue with it because it's good training, to keep me up to date.

There's a pretty major supply shortage in some subjects. The quality of marking is dire, doesn't take much of a Google to find multiple articles and blogs.

Exam marking should be better paid.

So prorata it’s the equivalent if about £34k per annum for the actual marking? I’d probably expect it to be above £40k but not much more, given that it’s essentially casual seasonal work and there is (to the best of my knowledge) no shortage of supply. I fully appreciate I might be wrong in that, but that’s my uninformed perspective.