GCSE - paying for remarks. You or school?

[Astronotus]

How can it be fair that some parents are asked to pay for remarks and some aren't?

Parents don't pay for state school education and don't pay the entry fees to take the GCSEs so how can it be fair they have to pay for remarks, especially when the schools suggest them? We all know schools are struggling with barely any money, but how did we let the Department of Education force these hidden costs on parents?

You don't hear about the ones who stayed the same as much.
This ^^
You don't get the mumsnet threads of 'my child got a mix of 6s and 7s all year, got a secure 6 in the exam so we paid for a marking review and it didn't change'.

Or, "my child was always struggling in English. We hoped they'd get a 5 but got a 4. School paid for all the 4/5 borderlines and 3/4 borderlines to have a review if we wanted it. DC stayed the same, most stayed the same and a couple actually went down".

You do get the threads ' how outrageous that my child was working on an 8 all year, came out with a 5 and after the review they were actually an 8 all along!'
Or
'Look how awful the system is because someone I know went of 10 marks! Everyone should know how awful everything is because it's not like they are 1 or 2 marks out but more like a grade and a half. You really need to be demanding remarks'. (Reality is that is a review of marking checks for clerical errors and the mark scheme has been applied correctly so the jumps will tend to be bigger because it's not a case of examiners arguing within a band, but was the band correctly applied)

How long do parents and pupils have to put up with this?
As long as parents keep voting people into government who make it very clear they can't stand state education & dont want to invest in it.
As long as parents complain, whine about 'oh but we cant take a day holiday' and back government rhetoric when school staff go on strike.
People could write to their MPs. They could back calls to fund schools properly. They could maybe actually think that when you get public sector workers striking there's probably a reason.
Until more people start making it know that education needs to be properly funded then it will continue to be underfunded.

That said, spending thousands each year on reviews of marking because some parents don't like the fact their child didn't get a certain grade is still a waste of money.

At the moment we have non-standardised procedures in this area and that's a potential source of unfairness.

In the case of Edexcel, it is possible for students’ exam scripts to be viewed online by teachers, making it easier to identify errors in marking. Other exam boards have a more opaque system.

Maybe those boards could follow the lead of Edexcel.

Some teachers are making use of Edexcel’s system to check their students' scripts to see if, in their professional opinion, the marking scheme has been applied correctly and, if not, whether a grade increase is likely upon a marking review. But not all teachers are doing this, even if the exam board the school is using is Edexcel.

Maybe it could become expected practice for teachers to do a marking review of their students’ scripts online and for parents/students to be alerted if there is a strong possibility of an upgrade. (Teachers’ diaries could be cleared so that they are not overstretched with this task.)

The question of payment for the exam board review procedure is a tricky one. The thought that some students are missing out because their parents/schools don’t have the wherewithal to pay makes me uneasy. I can understand that schools might not want to fork out unless they are certain of getting their money back and why parents are being asked to decide whether to fund the process when an element of risk is involved. Perhaps ability to pay should be a criterion, though, and provision should be made for those eligible for free school meals to have a school-funded marking review if there is a strong likelihood of a grade increase.

The system as it stands means that - to quote the Bible –

For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

And that can’t be right.

OutwiththeOutCrowd
I think Edexcel are right on this one and other boards should follow their lead.

I think quite a few schools will tend to already fund reviews for PP students.

I think my issue is you take a cohort of 200-250 students, each doing 9 or 10 subjects, most 100% exam. Should schools really pay for every exam where the child/parent isn't happy with the grade? I don't think so.

I'd be happy with a set up where any unusual outcomes were pulled for internal review, staff looked at them and decided if there was a case for review of marking and then put them in. I'm still not entirely convinced it should be done at parental request because their child got a 7 in 2 pieces of work but got a 6 overall.

Agree Outwith, I think the sooner the other boards follow Edexcel’s lead and allow exam scripts to be viewed online the better. My understanding is that requests for reviews have gone down as a result.

Maisy obviously more grades remain unchanged than not. But last year c25% of reviews (across GCSEs, AS & A Levels) resulted in a grade change. That’s 88,500 grades that were incorrect. As long as the marking is that unreliable I think parents and/or schools have every right to check that the grade awarded is right. I agree that this places a terrible financial burden on schools (or parents) but the answer is to improve the marking system, not to tell students that they should just accept what they’re given because it’s too expensive to rectify any errors.

Parents/teachers/society impress upon DC how important it is to work hard and get the best grades they can. We can’t then turn round and say the grades aren’t actually that important when it costs money to go from say a 6 to a 7 when the latter is their true grade.

If these were professional exams for adults, the results of which determined pay grade, this level of inconsistency and inaccuracy wouldn’t be tolerated.

There was never access to scripts before a remark for GCSE but exam boards have now been told that this must be in place by 2020. Edexcel are ahead of the curve with putting it online, I think with OCR you can request a paper copy. AQA haven’t been able to implement it yet, but will by the deadline.

Maybe it could become expected practice for teachers to do a marking review of their students’ scripts online

There’s one big fat problem that I have with this, and that it is an absolutely huge task, and one that teachers are being expected to do for free, most likely in their summer holiday, and if not, then in the first three weeks of term when they are already rushed off their feet.
It sounds like a good solution, but teachers should say a big NO to this becoming an expectation.

the answer is to improve the marking system

I know loads of teachers who used to do exam marking for whom it has become not worth it anymore. The pay isn’t good and the workload ridiculous.

Exam boards are really struggling to recruit.

I know noble. Sadly it all comes down to money. But if the boards can’t/won’t pay more to make marking worthwhile (and thereby attract better people to do it) then the system needs to change to reflect that.

Pretending that it’s good enough to effectively deliver a 9-grade scale with extremely narrow mark bands in some subjects is just unfair.

noblegiraffe
I won't mark GCSE. I'll do A Level though as they're generally better papers to mark.

No marking system will be perfect and I think the first year or so for any new spec will be full of teething errors (we found it last year when we first went 9-1 - I wasn't impressed with the board) but honestly if I look at my class results this year, they are what I thought people would get or higher, other than 1 who had a bad day and school paid for a remark because it was lower than anything they'd got in the last 6 months so we flagged it as an anomaly (it stayed the same by the way. They did have a bad day which is a shame).

Maisy I know no marking system will be perfect, but as far as I can see around 18-19% of remarks resulted in a grade change even before the new 9-1 exams. I think that’s too high when college places, A Level choices, university places etc etc ride on them being correct.

I know this is anecdata but in our case we have submitted 2 gcse subjects for remark/review, one for DD a few years ago and one for DS this year. In both cases they were 1 mark away from the grade above. There were 4 papers in total and ALL of them changed. And this was in Maths and a science.

Are you saying that, with regard to your class results, as they were almost all broadly in line with expectations it doesn’t really matter if they were accurate in reality? Genuine question, I’m not trying to be arsey.

cherry
I don't think it's ok that things are marked wrong.
I'm aware for one paper they didn't have enough people to mark one of the questions for my subject as they'd managed to freeze out a few hundred markers for being out of tolerance too much and it meant there were hundreds of scripts for one of our questions having to be marked last minute by largely team leaders and senior markers (from what my examining friends said). It does seem for our subject they have made changes from the issues last year and that probably reflects the fact most people i know haven't had papers go up on review.

In terms of my class (withour being outing) they came out bang on or above what they were achieving in the run up to the exams. Out of all the friends I know teaching my subject, very few reviews have led to grades increasing this year. That matches what we found in our centre. On the whole I'd say that I'm reasomably confident that they are accurate.

To improve the examining system there needs to be a wholesale reform of how things are done. That can't be done whilst (rightly) there is a requirement for a marker to have taught 3 terms in the key stage and subject that they apply to mark (although some places seem to relax that a bit). Most markers are full time teachers. Scripts can't be marked in gained time reasonably, it has to be done on evenings on top of the day job. You allocated an evening to mark your allocation but because you are out on one of the seeded ones, you're frozen out for anything between 20 mins and 8 hours until the team leader (also often a teacher) comes online and let's you back in so you've set aside time yo mark but then can't mark. People don't get paid for the seeded ones either. Then the boards insist on deadlines for x numbers of questions, with seemingly no regard for the fact people are still doing the day job (and keep being locked out for 12-24 hours because some of the seeded ones are weirdly marked - one friend was locked out for 3 days because her team leader was away).

You'd almost need a situation where schools allow markers 1 day off work a week to mark and an expectation that team leaders were non teachers working shifts to let people back into the system.

To a greater or lesser extent you can't get around the fact that many subjects don't have right/wrong simple answers so there will always be some variation ad it's the nature of those subjects. You just have to do the best you can.

Thanks for the explanation of how it works Maisy, it’s all a bit of a mystery if you’re not involved in education.

I agree that the subjects that don’t have right/wrong answers will have some variation by their nature, and there’s not much you can do within any system to iron that out.

But eg DS dropped 2 marks on a question in a science paper that needed 2 one word answers. Both were correct but he had been scored 0. That can only have been carelessness, and on its own would have cost him his rightful grade. Luckily we’re in a position to pay for a review. Somebody who wasn’t would have simply dropped a grade. That can’t be right.

Cherryburn
I'll be honest the first year through our new spec I don't think teachers really knew what the score was fully. My school did ok because we taught to the top of the specification and it was fine. I imagine it's more of a problem if you're in a school where your top set are targeted grade 5s and 6s.

I always tell students we aim as high up the mark scheme as possible and I don't teach to target grades. It seems to work well.

I see what you mean in your son's situation. I think the Edexcel function of seeing papers prior to review is a good one (but as noble, I think, said it's how you manage teachers looking at papers every time someone just wants a quick check)

I do think our board has made changes that are in the right direction. I'm not convinced you'll get a fool proof system.

On Edexcel this year we requested the exam script to decide on a remark and the school (exams officer) sent us the actual paper. It can't work for all subjects but it was pretty clear to us/DC that something had gone wrong on the marking.

One potential problem with Edexcel is that it is a private company. (The parent company Pearson sells the ‘officially endorsed’ textbooks that cover the examined material.) The question arises as to whether it is actually primarily concerned with making a profit. Markers might be being paid peanuts but the business itself is generating a lot of cash.

The other two main examination boards, AQA and OCR, have ‘charitable status’, a status questioned by some critics. They also generate significant amounts of cash.

Maybe in such a business-minded environment we shouldn’t be surprised that those higher up the socioeconomic ladder are able to pay for a superior service.

Education is quite an odd affair all round in this country. The government has two strange bedfellows – a private company on one side and the Church on the other!

Yes that is true - actually quite bizarre that all not just run by Dept of Education or at least a single charitable foundation with one exam per subject bit like the International Baccalaureate (although they charge for remarks as well.)

ZOMBIE THREAD