GCSE exam markers please

[Cobwebs5]

I have twins, so they will take their GCSEs at the same time. What is the chance that the same examiner will mark both their papers please ? Will their candidate numbers be consecutive ? Is that even relevant ?

It depends. Papers are scanned and allocated to people for marking.

Some exam boards split it whereby one examiner marks all of a particular question (or sunset of questions) for more candidates. Some split it so one examiner marks the whole of a test centre (IE school).

A sample of examiner's marks are reviewed for consistency to the mark scheme.

I'm not an exam marker (so can't answer your question) but dt have just done their gcses this time and had consecutive candidate numbers.

The examiner doesn't see personal information about the candidate if that is a concern.

For my exam board it doesn’t work like that. Say I am marking 1.4, I am unlikely to be the only person marking 1.4 at that time, so i mark one of your kids responses and someone else marks the other. Whilst I am marking 1.4 another marker 200 miles away is marking 6.8 and at that point no else is marking that response so they mark both of your kids, one person does not mark the whole paper of one student.

Yes it is all online and for some the questions are separated out to different examiners

why does it matter?

I am not a marker but I know several and many exams are marked, as others say, by allocating a specific question or questions to a marker.

It’s pretty unusual I gather to be marking the whole of a specific paper as my Dad used to do way back in the day (I was employed to check his addition!).

It's done on computer (hence black pen) and yy no personal detail is included.

Why do you ask @Cobwebs5 ?

It isn’t marked that way. The papers are divided up into questions, the examiners mark batches of questions. You will have several markers mark one paper. They don’t have any details of the student on there. So I may have marked my own students work but I will never know!

The batches are on a huge system, so if I mark one question, look at another, decide i want a coffee log out and log back in again it’s an entirely different response as someone else will have marked the original question in the time I logged out.

AQA suggest that you prepare some ideas in advance for questions such as creative writing. So the twins are preparing some generic descriptions that could be adapted to a number of pictures or storylines. For instance some ambitious vocabulary for bad weather. I’m wondering if they use some similar pieces how likely that question is to be marked by the same examiner ? And if it is marked by the same examiner if it’s likely to be a problem.

what pp have said and ask school to get papers- it’s feee - so you can compare them

You're massively overthinking this! There'll be whole classes that will have revised the same "interesting vocabulary" or creative writing ideas to use in the exam...No-one will suspect foul play of any sort.

Having marked for almost a decade now - they all organically write very similar things anyway!

I’ve marked exams this year - a lot of the answers are very very similar - sometimes I get an inkling that there’s a theme running through some that makes me suspect they’re from the same centre but honestly it has literally zero bearing on the marks - you mark what’s in front of you. Candidates are prepared and taught in similar ways, they’re the same age and from similar cultural backgrounds…they’ll write similar things. That’s fine. And you have no idea where they’re from or who they are. I mark a subject with a relatively small amount of centres so that’s why I might suspect patterns, but it doesn’t affect the marks at all. GCSE English has a vast amount of entries so the odds are small they’d get marked by the same examiner, and if they did, it wouldn’t matter.

So if both twins write something very, very similar and it’s marked by the same examiner, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Thats good to know.
Thank you.

You get one answer at a time, mark it and move on. Even if you later got one that was the same, you have no way of going back to the first one or even referring to it.

@AtomicBlondeRose
Thats great. I thought that might be the case.

I am an exam marker for IGCSE and in my subject we mark whole papers. I know at least one other subject is the same so I wouldn't assume that all papers across all subjects and boards are done in the same way

For a different board papers that cant be scanned for any reason are also marked as whole papers

But to answer the original question it's definitely possible for the same marker or mark both papers but unlikely to happen for every part of every question just because of the way the systems work

That's really bad practice, doesn't your board run a conflict system? I work for two boards and for both I have to submit any centres I have a connection with so I'm blocked from being presented with any scripts from those centres. They ask for it every sitting

Do you mind saying which board allows examiners to mark their own school?

No it’s not a problem. I marked papers a couple of weeks ago with 3 identical opening paragraphs. The teacher had clearly told them ‘learn this and get it down so you’ve got historical context in there’. There are also repeated phrases used that kids have clearly got from YouTube or somewhere (best avoided btw!) They are marked according to the mark scheme and you just treat each one as a new paper.

@Moglet4
Thank you.

Absolutely not bad practice please read what I wrote, I said the responses are completely anonymous so there is no way you could identify whose answers you are marking! Which is good practice!

But surely you could recognise you own child's handwriting or spelling quirks?

You might think so but you rapidly realise there are basically only about four styles of handwriting and none of them can spell! I filled in the conflict forms and still got papers I would have swore were my own students’ - I’m sure they weren’t! But among a cohort of students sitting the same exam and following the same syllabus you’re going to get very similar types of students who think and write in very similar ways.

If course it's bad practice, I've been an examiner for years, I know exactly how it works and I'm very surprised to hear of a board that doesn't operate a conflict of interest register for examiners

Strange that you wouldn't recognize either the writing or content of one of your own students

Apart from anything else surely you'd want to avoid any possible suggestions of malpractice

Yes and boys really should be discouraged from the ‘write like you’re an ant doing Morse code’ style. It’s extremely popular it would seem and completely illegible! For one essay I had to logout twice so someone else would have to try and decipher it!

Almost as bad is the opposite extreme - very neat and very very small!