Exam marking fair pay?

[Dinopoppypoops]

I've been marking for an exam board that might have a name similar to a spreadsheet.

I got a payment for standardisation today (the process you go through to check the quality of your marking before you start). It was an A level paper and I earned approx £150 gross. It took me over 10 hours to pass standardisation so I earned less than £15 an hour. I have marked for over 10 years. I'm experienced and it always takes this long to learn the paper and mark scheme. After tax it was less than £10 an hour.
I then calculated that I was paid approx £18 an hour gross for marking.
I have all the relevant qualifications and 20+ years experience and the marking takes huge amounts of concentration and expertise.

A couple of times, I found myself rushing to try to get the work done and earn a bit more per hour but these papers decide the future of kids wanting to go off to university and it's not fair to rush them.

Whether you're a marker, a teacher or a parent, do you think paying markers this much is fair?

I'd love to hear from other markers to find out whether my experience is typical.

Voting:
Yes, it's above minimum wage, you signed the contract, get on with it!

No, the pay doesn't reflect the expertise and effort required.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!!

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.🙄

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

34k a year is not good for the level of knowledge needed, especially as there are no other perks, like sick pay.
For a full 100 mark A level paper it's less than £5:50 a script. If I rush I can do 4 in an hour but that's not high quality marking and it's not something I'd want to do. The results are just too important.
The pay should be doubled in my opinion.

I'm going to turn it down next year but I just wondered what others thought of it.

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.

It's got worse hasn't it.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I mark for the SQA and completely agree with you. There is a huge amount of pressure to complete within a tight time frame so all family activities are cancelled for the marking period.
The markers’ meeting is now online so the networking and discussion of the paper/marking instructions is very limited. When I was new to marking (a very long time ago) this was a great opportunity to further my understanding of the course. I’d hate to be a new marker now.
We were paid £5 something per paper. Each paper took between 5 minutes and 20 minutes to mark. Most were nearer 20 minutes. You’ve then got the time taken to email Team Leader and reply as to why you’ve marked in a certain way etc.
As a teacher I do believe it is a really important thing to do in order to fully understand the courses,however it is incredibly stressful and provides very little pay for the time and stress involved.
Why do I keep doing it? Partly due to rose tinted glasses-oh it won’t be so bad this year… Partly because I love the subject and enjoy seeing how different schools are teaching certain topics (this helps me with my tutoring too). Also because I know I know the course and understand it so I mark thoroughly-these exams determine students’ futures and I want to help make sure that they have every opportunity available to them!

I stopped marking GCSE papers as the pay was dire. Every few questions you get a 'seed' - a pretend answer that you don't get paid for. I spent too much time marking seeds, so free work. I'm not doing it again, ever!

Just thinking of the consequences here if you had double/triple pay etc. can your schools afford to pay an extra £5.50 or whatever it might be per exam entry? How would that impact your base salary at your school if the government don't pick up the tab? Will schools start shutting subjects down to save money by entering pupils into fewer exams?

If the pay is clearly set out upfront. If you rather make more money doing something else then do that. I never understand people who choose to take on work then complain it isn't paid enough.

I examined for the same exam board and the pay dropped remarkably over ten years. I remember doing it in 2014 and earning nearly £1000 after tax. By 2020 when I did it for the last time it was barely £700. When you consider inflation over this period, it’s a very significant cut in pay. To get the £700 my allocation was also nearly doubled from 2014. The sad truth is though that the cost of living is now so high that they can still get people. In 2014 I did the marking for holiday and fun money. Now I do twice the amount for just over half the money (now a diff exam board) and I do it to pay for food.

The pay is low and you're not unreasonable to bring this up. My brother used to do it before Covid and the pay was good, though he did find it stressful.

I invigilate exams and we get minimum wage, so it actually works out more. Quite shocked that you don't get paid more.

I think a lot of us see it as something we're usually not getting paid to do at all (as part of being a teacher; you're just supposed to mark practice papers, homework etc in your own time as part of what you're being paid IYSWIM) so any pay is better than nothing, which isn't necessarily the best mindset. They take advantage of that. I don't think the pay is as good as it used to be but I'd have to hunt for details to check if it hasn't gone up over the years or if it has but not by enough.

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.

That's really poor. No wonder so many decide to get their kids' papers remarked and checked.

The pay details are in the contracts that are sent out well in advance so the pay shouldn't have been a surprise to you OP.

But yes, pay should be higher although they'll probably end up farming it out to China or even get AI to mark it if teachers refuse en masse as it's all/mostly online now.