Marking for the exam boards - experiences/views?

[gabsid]

I have just been approved to mark for OCR exam board and have also applied to mark for Edexel - German.

Has anyone done that? I would like to hear about your experiences/views. How many papers do you get to mark, how long does it take and how much do you get paid per paper/in total?

Is there support available if you have a question?

I would welcome any experience details too - just been accepted to mark for Edexcel on a multiple choice paper

I haven't done this (yet), but my HOD keeps hassling me to do it.

The payment is fine if you are strapped for cash, not so if you have a rich husband :)

The main benefit is knowing exactly how papers are assessed and to let this influence your teaching. It is very good professional development.

How can you mark multiple choice?

I'm sceptical as well would have thought that they scanned in! I was hoping for the controlled assessment paper or the extended writing paper as we have had to change from BTEC to GCSE and could do with all the inside info we can get

Edexcel do scan their papers to be either optically-read or mark online by real live teachers.

Which is a good point for the OP...

Edexcel scans in the scripts and sends batches of single questions to their markers. Each individual marker will mark just the one question, or perhaps a few small questions.

You don't know which schools the candidates have come from or how they have done on the rest of the paper. It's a good way of ensuring fairness and consistency.

You have to like working on a screen and have a reliable broadband connection.

You are part of a team of markers and you can get support from your team leader.

I don't know anything about specific numbers but you have to have all your marking done within a strict amount of time. ISTR a colleague earning about £1000 for three weeks worth of marking - this was lots of hours of work after school and at weekends.

That sounds fine for me as I haven't taught in years and still have DC at home/school, and £1000 sounds great if you are just doing 1-2 days supply per week.

Marking a single question of a multiple choice paper sounds very simple and quite repetative, and I can't see how you can learn much as a practicing teacher. I suppose there are more interesting contracts too, e.g. marking writing tasks.

Thanks for your info!

wildly late to the convo!!
I mark biology for aqa, we usually get between 750 and 850 gcse scripts per exam. They tend to remove the marks for 2 or 3 questions where there is only 1 possible answer and give them to a cheaper marker. I mark online, and all prep is online, no standardisation face to face meetings these day, which i like. You can have a high degree of confidence you are doing it right, as they throw in seeds (already marked by the chief examiner)every so often, and if you get them wrong the computer stops you and you have to have a chat with a senior marker. In terms of improving my teaching it has been very useful, particularly with the changeover to the new spec. Downside is the time required, i lose 3 weeks of my life for every paper i mark(all weekend every weekend, all night, every night during the allocated time span), but i do teach full time as well, with additional responsibilities so if not doing that then definitely not so bad. I get about £1100 before tax for each set, happily they deduct tax at source so no need to wrangle with HMRC.

I mark A level ICT - it's the same as Loshad says, in that all the marking is online, but the examiner marks the whole paper. I used to find the standardisation weekends really useful (we'd go through the paper and the markscheme and do several practice papers) but now it's online and you have to struggle through the markscheme on your own (without even a phone call) I find it really difficult.

It's so hard to mark more than about 250 within the time, whereas when it was paperbased I could do 450. When someone has bad handwriting it's incredibly difficult to read it online. Essays are really awful to read.

I only get about £450 after three weeks of going nearly blind - I don't want to do it any more.

I marked GCSE History for CCEA, the northern Irish board.

It was very useful in terms of teaching the course IMO.

It was not so useful in terms of money! After weeks of work (which leaked into summer hol!) I made about £400.
I stopped doing it 3 years ago when I got promoted to head of dept and don't miss it