Marking 180 mock papers….can’t cope

[Supermummy88]

Good everyone.

I’ve been teaching for over 10 years and had a career break for 2 years whilst my children were young and not in full time school. I was doing supply a few days a week. However, I’ve now gone back into work full time and taken the role as head of geography. I started in October. I have 3 year 11 classes, 2 year 10 classes, 2 year 9 classes, 1 year 8 and 1 year 7.

The year 11’s had their mocks in december and I marked both paper 1 and paper 2. Both papers were about 20 pages long each…120 papers in total! I really struggled to mark them all. I have 2 young children of my own and I felt they really struggled as I spent no time with them at all.

Year 11 now have mocks again in February and I will have to mark again, however this time I will also have to mark paper 3. I know deep down I won’t be able to cope…especially because of the work load I already have. I’m now thinking that I perhaps should have just stuck to supply teaching. It took me about 40 minutes to mark each paper as there are many extended questions.

What are your thoughts on this? In previous schools I’ve only ever had one year 11 class so the mock marking wasn’t as intense.

Thank you

Why is that surprising ? I could type on here the very well known name of a private school where this happens but I won't.

The other teacher will have they own workload, and won’t have time free either. The real cause of most of the issues is that these days teachers need more in school PPA time, as the demands are greater than they used to be.

In England, teachers are pretty much expected to be able to turn their hand to anything at KS3.

Pay to have them (or one of them) externally marked as a dept. It will provide more accurate, reliable data and will be a massive workload win with your dept.
would prob cost about £1000 of your budget depending on size of cohort

Departments don't tend to have a grand sloshing around for emergency situations. Buying glue-sticks can be a strain.

Not true. Takes me 15

I'd say around 10. It depends if you want to write comments.

I agree it's a waste of a teacher's time but have you seen the workload school office admin staff these days? More and more piled on them every year. The problem in schools is that years of underfunding has happened across the board. At the teaching end of things you have teachers expected to teach GCSE in subjects they've only done at A-level, TAs and SEND staffing has been cut, site staff and office staff don't get replace when they retire, jobs are combined etc etc. Schools these days unfortunately are places where you will just be expected to work your absolute ass off, and a the lower end of the scale it's for a pittance.

OP, if I were you I'd have to go off sick. And take the marking home with me and just go at it at home.

Thanks. So it’s "only" 9 hours of additional work. Not insignificant, but not impossible to do. Less burdensome with some of the helpful suggestions being offered.

You need help with marking. It's not possible for one person to mark 180 papers on top of the normal workload.

Think about what you can do, and what you will need help with.

Can you get the trainee to mark the 1/2 mark questions? Can you be given cover for a few lessons? Are there other teachers in your department that might be able to help? If you go to the VP with solutions you might get somewhere.

I mark these geography papers for the exam board and P1 is a an absolute drain!

I don't do paper two P3 which is quicker.

P1 is about 10'mins per script online but then as it paper it needs adding up

So 15 mins per script and if it's a grammar and no less abel to lighten the load it's infernal.

Script by script is fine and just as quick. Can you imagine having stack of 180'papers open on one page?

There is no way a GCSE paper takes 5 minutes to mark. It will take me at least 15 minutes to mark a paper and I am
an experienced teacher and examiner. She has 180 to mark.

I think you need to take your best estimate of how long it will take to mark these papers and take that estimate to the Headteacher for advice.

Someone here estimated 80 hours of marking. If it was 80 hours of marking then if you do 3 hours of work after school each day (assuming you have other prep work to do before you start and in any breaks - or maybe you actually take a break) and if you need to do an hour of other prep after school then you have 2 hours for marking so 80 hours of marking would take you 40 working days.

If this was realistic for example, you could find out if the Head is happy with a 40 working day turnaround - add the weekends and holidays on to your estimated finish date, or not. If they are not happy with that time scale what do they propose?

If you can't do it, you can't do it. Take the stress and emotion out of it. It isn't feasible.

It's not your responsibility to sort out this ridiculous timetabling overload, but you could suggest the following options: You take time off to do the marking and they get a supply in; they get an external examiner to mark the mock papers; the pupils don't do mocks but tests that are peer marked in class.

It depends on the subject. I think Geography papers have some 1 and 2 mark questions so those are very quick to mark.

Getting lots of variability in time taken to mark a paper. But it seems that 180 (@15 mins per) will take 27 hrs or three days. That seems like a lot of work to me.

Haven’t read all the replies but I teach a gcse subject which has two exams and we break it down into one paper. To be honest we wouldn’t have all the content finished by our next lot of mocks.

I sympathise op, the workload is totally unrealistic. Are you still teaching new content to y11? What's behaviour like in lessons, can you set students up with independent learning takes for a big chunk of lessons so you can mark? I think your colleague needs to do some of it too, even if he leaves the level marked questions for you. I always do a page at a time so that I can whiz through them.

Although those are not ridiculous suggestions, they're really not going to happen because of budget restrictions. Plus, no peer marking is usually allowed in mocks. I do think she needs to make the point to SLT though, even if there are no concessions this time.

I regularly had 5 GCSR classes and often y12 and y13 as well - plus all my KS3 classes (RE teacher). The marking is a grind, no question. You have to lower your standards and mark each paper quicker - I would say 20 mins max. Just mark less thoroughly. It's the only way to get it done. I would push back strongly now on doing 3 papers (fucking ridiculous) and on doing mocks twice, in hopes that it would change next year. Raise it now and raise it again at end of year and at start of next year.

But they might have, hence my making a perfectly valid suggestion. I know many who do this.
If not this time, then it could be build into next year’s spending.

We don't have money for pencils. I'm glad there's schools out there who still support the teachers with supply for marking.

It takes me 5 minutes and I am also an experienced teacher and examiner. I find once I am in the 'flow' of a paper I go very quickly, because I know what to expect from the question once I've marked five or so and the marking becomes instinctive as the mark scheme is just embedded in your brain - no need to keep double checking. That's why it's more efficient to mark question by question rather than doing a whole paper in one go, as it keeps you in that 'flow' state. Chopping and changing between questions really slows you down.

Experienced English teacher here.

I know this will be really controversial, but in your situation, I would pretend to be sick (say you’ve got D&V badly or something) and be off for three days. Aim to get a large chunk of it done. It will ease the burden. I’ve known colleagues do this before.

Do peer marking for the shorter questions so you just have to mark the extended essays. Are there 30 pupils in each class? You might take 40 mins on first few but should speed up. Sounds unmanageable having that many classes.