AIBU to feel uneasy that GCSE remarks depend on ability to pay

@LoserWinner I don't agree the payment is satisfactory (if it were, the exam boards wouldn't have to do the desperate advertising). When you include the compulsory training and unpaid standardisation, it's under minimum wage per hour (I added it up last time I did it). I would do it for maybe twice that. It's maybe good CPD to do it once IF you have a good team leader and not too much else on (said no teacher ever 😂).

I agree with the rest of what you said.

Fair enough about school teachers needing hours to properly check papers. You, not only do that but are also on Mumsnet advising others on exams day and deserve a medal! 💐

Thanks because of your advice did we go ahead with the remark and 2 years on DS has been accepted by his first choice (not an exceptional but good university) to study CS and is going to stay at home, no maintenance loan needed thankfully!

It was lucky DS1 was able to identify the question in the first place but I found weird the maths teacher's answer. We don't know what would have happened though if it had been a humanities subject 🥶

DS3 said his friend got a much lower grade in GCSE Spanish considering that unlike DS he had always received 8s and 9s in his mocks and knew all the grammar and conjugations. I suggested asking for the scripts and DS1 (again!) who got an A in Spanish A-level could go through with them to see if their was a problem or his friend simply underperformed. DS3 had no idea this was a possibility.

In general, people don’t request a review of marking (a) if the mark is better than expected, (b) if it is much as expected and well below the grade boundary for the next grade up, (c) if the mark is a few marks below the boundary, but it’s clear there are no errors, (d) if they underperform a bit, but in similar ways on two or more papers.

People request a review of marking (e) if they, their parents, teacher or school spot a specific error - say a missed question, addition error or a question marked wrong that is clearly correct, (f) if they did really well on one or more papers, but scored very low on one paper, or (g) if they are one or two marks below a grade boundary. Some of (e) and (f) will be close to a boundary. There are more requests for reviews from fee-paying schools than from state schools, and more from high-achieving schools than from more average schools.

For these reasons, where a review of marking is requested, there is more likelihood that there is a genuine error, particularly in the case of (e) or (f), and a mark is more likely to go up than down. Then people post to social media, tell all their friends, and generally put it about that the marking is rubbish, and attribute it to lack of training, inadequate pay for examiners or some other problem with the system.

In fact, examiners do have to do training. Experienced examiners still have to retrain every year. New examiners have a reduced workload so that they can spend a little more time on each question until they build up experience. All marking is supervised, monitored and corrected if necessary by senior examiners, with one to one feedback throughout the marking period, and the payment is, if not generous, certainly satisfactory. In addition, exam marking provides teachers with excellent professional development experience at no cost to them or their school, and they get paid for doing it. (CPD, which is generally compulsory, can cost anything upwards of £250 per course, so examiners are effectively saving the school money.). Many examiners mark more than one paper (eg, GCSE and A Level for their subject) and return year after year. The exam boards and senior examiners are very supportive, provide performance feedback, and encourage examiners to develop their examining career alongside their day job.

Last year, 4.6% of grades were challenged. Of those, 75.9% were NOT changed. That means that just under 1.1% of all grades were changed after a review of marking - that’s just a wee bit over one exam for one student out of 100 exams. In my view, just under 99% accurate marking isn’t bad.

Oh, and while posters are being dismissive of examiners’ competence, do try to remember that some of your own children’s teachers may well be GCSE or A Level examiners. They can’t disclose that to you because examiners are supposed to keep their role confidential except on a need-to-know basis where their head of department/ SLT need to be aware.

We paid for remarks, school didn’t offer to cover costs, but were refunded when grades changed.

@CassandraWebb you only cover costs if the grade remains the same. It’s best to request the free script first and check whether a remark is worth per suing.

@propertymug absolutely no offence taken 💐 the misinformation and lack of information is a part of the problem and it shouldn't be strangers on the Internet advising parents and students.
There will always be human error but I think most school staff would prefer human markers to AI! From an exams office POV part of the solution is playing exams officers to work over the holidays and supporting us to get accurate info out to students and parents (and if everyone could stop saying remark that would help 😆). I don't know how to help teachers as it's a huge job they do for free.

There were almost 6,199,256 entries for GCSEs.
There were 845.485 entries for A levels.

So that is around 7 million entries. Of course a small amount will have errors and some will make it to MN!
But in the greater scheme of things, most of it won’t matter. Whether you get a 6 or a 7 or even an 8 at GCSE - it won’t make a blind bit of difference in the long run.
It only affects if parents make a big fuss or it affects next steps and your uni offer is not met. But unis are on to this now and increasingly priority reviews do go in if someone really has underperformed against predicted grades.

Could exams be double marked? Not easily and not without the entry fee going up.

One of the papers I mark had over 600,000 candidates. Marking all if those twice would double the amount of time needed to do it.

Missed questions are interesting. In none of the papers I mark is it possible to skip by a question without awarding something. From my experience, the vast majority of those are where the script has been miscanned so the examiner hasn't seen it because it's just not there.

And there are far fewer errors than people think. If I just take my own class as a sample, I've seen 6 scripts so far because the results made me go "hmmm". Not one of them will be recommended for review because they've all done something daft or just not quite done enough to get more marks. But people don't talk about those, or the ones who pull it out of the bag on the day.

Apologies if I’ve offended any teachers - believe me that wasn’t my intention and I understand and appreciate how hard teachers work - I totally agree this is an issue with the system and I’ve said elsewhere that if the exams were marked properly in the first place there wouldn’t be a need for this process- there should not be so many stories of students not being awarded the correct marks - they are playing with children’s futures.

I don’t know what the answer is - there will always be human error I guess. I don’t know the exam marking process - could questions be double marked? Someone checking at the end that every question has been marked? Examiners paid more so that it’s worth their while? It just seems so unfair for the kids who are mismarked and will never find out.

I have no idea if my DD has been mismarked - she may have just messed up under the pressure and that’s what I assumed when we got her results. It’s only reading these threads that I am now aware of how prevalent marking errors seem to be and that different schools deal with the review process so differently. So we have requested the papers and will use the links provided on this thread to check if her marks are reasonable (as they don’t make sense compared to her mocks and all past performance). But what about the parents who haven’t read this thread and have no idea how to go about this? My frustration is at the unfair system, not the individual teachers already struggling with an unsustainable workload.

The reality is that teachers will be looking at papers in their own time regardless of when they do it. In September they will be teaching full time again so it's take time away from their children in August or take evenings away from them in September.

Many schools also refuse to pay exams officers to work outside term time. My current school pays me to work the week after GCSE but my previous 2 school didn't so I would have been the hold up there because there was no way I was working for free given how little I got paid and the inflexible reaction to any overtime I did during GCSEs.
I agree it's a shame that it's a lottery but put the shame where it belongs, on government underfunding of schools and exam boards paying markers so little.

Hah, I remember that. I still don’t know why he wasn’t awarded full marks but as he got enough to move up a grade it didn’t matter!

Worth pointing out to those who think me looking through that question speaks badly of other teachers who don’t - it was only one question on one paper that I looked at which took a couple of minutes. Looking through full sets of papers is far more work than that.

I looked through a further maths paper last week and that probably took going on for two hours because I had to get my head around the questions myself first before looking closely at the marking.

That’s outrageous

This is very helpful, thank you 🙏🏻

Examiner AI by tutor2u https://share.google/W90EX3WdRXc3t0QgN this might be useful for parents wanting an opinion on essays and more subjective questions. It includes some free pages before you have to pay. I haven't used it myself but Tutor2u are well respected.

Teachers are still on holiday. Help tends to be available for those who missed their uni offer or a Sixth Form place entirely AND where the grade looks out of sync to predictions.

The nice to have extra marks tend to be on the parents even if the marking was harsh. Parents can pay and find someone to pay to have a look as well presumably. Although nobody can give you an answer for sure unless whole pages etc weren’t marked. So manifest error can be obvious even to a normal person. However, whether the wrong level was assigned on a long form question even an experienced teacher won’t always be able to tell.

According to lots of PP on this thread and others there are plenty of teachers who do just that - review the paper with their student? I didn’t know this was a thing until reading these posts and most of the advice given is look at your paper with your teacher/subject specialist. Another PP mentioned teachers do have access to the mark scheme (whereas parents clearly do not).

I would not expect a teacher to take time away from their kids to review a paper in the holidays but when they return back to school? If a stranger can do it for someone on the internet, I would think a teacher invested in his/her students would?

Or maybe all the PP kids go to private school and this is standard at their schools but not at state? Like I said, this is my first child going through GCSEs so this is all new to me and I’m only going by what I’m reading on here - and yes, the process does seem unfair when some schools help their students review papers and submit for review and others don’t.

I am not sure why you think schools are unsupportive?
From a parents POV it's obviously very simple for the teacher to just magically conjure an answer, but from teacher's not so much- I had a student once who was a few marks away from a higher grade. They wanted me to review all their papers (while I was abroad on holiday), emailed me a bunch of times, I had to stop playing with kids and comb with a fine tooth without the mark scheme as they are not available for the current exams, and then guess which paper had the biggest chance of success in terms of remarking. And sometimes the MS is not that obvious either for my subject- so without seeing it you may not be able to figure out easily what was the exact thing they wanted a student to put down or which wording would be accepted and which one would not be.
And as you can guess, I had more than one student in the class, so it was not the only query I was dealing with.

It's actually a significant change.

Back in the day, you could - at no risk because there was grade protection - have a small cohort remarked and use those to trigger a cohort remark which would ONLY move grades up. It was a cheap way to buy better grades.

I remember when they introduced this change, but to me it seemed nominal in terms of how they call it, as the result is the same and very few grades haven't changed over the years, it's almost unusual to see them stay the same (or go down) and I saw increases by 10+ poionts in some instances.

No, you are not being over-cautious. Both Ofqual and the exam boards insist that it is only a check that the marking is reasonable. It is not a re-mark from scratch. Senior examiners have to undertake training which hammers that point home.

Fair enough. I don't think I gave any stats though! I haven't found the same as you to be the case (also a teaching professional) but, as I have already replied earlier, anyone should go ahead if they want to. Some schools and colleges may have the budget for reviews of marking, my recent experience professionally has been different. Perhaps positive outcomes depend on the subject or exam board? I was only going on personal experience. I remember when remarks became reviews (about 7 years ago or so at a guess) being warned by our exams team that they were quite different in nature to 'remarks' but perhaps this was overly cautious.

I work in FE and we won't put students in for November resit or remark unless they're only a few marks off the grade they wanted. Otherwise, yes - they could go down.

On the subject of payment, I have worked in independent schools, and many of those don't even pay for the original exam entries - the students' parents have to pay for each examination entry.

I think what they mean is the script iant remarked blind, someone else reviews the marks.

Dd got her results a couple days ago and one staff members mentioned to her about a remark. Dds got 4s and one 3 which was geography. Dd is not bothered either way as she's got a place in the college she wanted. But must still be a thing. Because dd wouldn't have heard of that unless it was said to her.

I believe they can go down.

The only thing I have found with AI is that wordy questions with nuances can catch it out, especially if it's got to integrate words and numbers. But it does as well as an experienced teacher, just making machine-type mistakes rather than human-type. But it's good enough for the purpose.