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

[CassandraWebb]

My DC is only doing one GCSE this year, a year early, but as I was looking through the information to check timings etc I noticed an email about the "remark" service and the costs

We could afford to pay if needed, but I do a lot of work with people who are in financially difficult situations.

I do fully understand there's a cost to remarking. But it just makes me feel really uncomfortable that clearly the costs might mean some people just don't have that option.

Is there help for people who can't afford to pay? There's no mention of it in the email.

That's very strange. Yesterday DS applied for student loan fees. He doesn't need the maintenance loan because he chose to stay at home and it would be a killer to get another loan. Although he didn't choose a maintenance loan there was a warning right before you press the button to go through with it that the maximum maintenance loan you can get if you live at home is 4k.

Ah thanks for that info - it’s annoying we can’t get the mark scheme. All this advice re checking the paper for missed marks but as parents without access to the mark scheme then that seems pretty impossible! Appreciate you letting us know that AI can be pretty reasonable here - if the school won’t help then that seems to be our only option :(.

In 2024 DS2 needed to get a 7 in maths to get CS A-level. His maths teacher was not very helpful and could not identify a paper which could help him. DS1 who's brilliant at maths quickly found a question where he had got 0/4 marks. The question was in ratios and DS had solved it in fractions. No specific method was requested. When we mentioned this to the teacher he said that he didn't know what the mark scheme wanted. Well if this is a problem for a maths teacher, neither did students know the mark scheme!
I asked @noblegiraffe who surprisingly immediately told me that the mark scheme had the answer in fractions and also upon seeing it that DS had solved it properly. She also said that she had never seen a maths paper go up by 4 marks and advised about how to appeal if needed. Another poster said her son had also solved it in fractions and had received the full marks.
The remark only gave him 1/4 which was good enough to get a 7 but he deserved the full marks.

Wow - it’s actually scary hearing so many stories of examiners getting it wrong. I don’t know what the solution is - providing the mark scheme would at least make it fairer for kids who want to challenge their mark but don’t have a supportive school. Amazing that @noblegiraffewas able to help you - what does that say about the teachers who can’t be bothered to help their own students when there’s wonderful people willing to help strangers on the net.

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.

I believe they can go down.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This is very helpful, thank you 🙏🏻

That’s outrageous

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.