Marking maths assessments

[Dermymc]

@noblegiraffe and others

Department has a new policy... When marking assessments we should use examiner codes like A1, M1 etc to annotate each answer.

My argument is with 1 mark questions (and arguably others) this is extra and unnecessary writing for very little student benefit. I can possibly see the benefit for long 4+ mark questions.

Currently I circle marks they have got and put a line through ones they haven't. On longer questions I tick next to where the mark has been gained and in a feedback lesson go though how it would be marked and how to do it correctly.

What do you think?

(deliberately nc for this)

How about if you show them the mark scheme after you've marked and they annotate as they go?
In my school if they then went back it would be classed as directed improvement time, if you have to do it.

Mineof that is what I currently do. Apparently this is not good enough.

I'm just seeing a lot of wasted teacher time for very little (if any) student gain.

That sounds pretty tedious. Who does that benefit?

We moved away from counting marks and have focussed on which of the objectives they have achieved and get them to approve those they didn’t. Very quick for us and ofsted rather liked it.

Whose silly idea was that? I mean, just why? Kids won't care if a mark they got is an M1 or an A1 (what about P, B and C codes? Either you care about codes or you don't), what they need to know is why they lost marks, and coding the marks that they gained won't tell them this. To find out what they lost marks for, the student would either have to compare in great detail against a detailed mark scheme (is this just past papers or all assessments, in which case are teachers now supposed to write proper mark schemes?) which all but the brightest won't be able to do because mark schemes aren't child friendly, or the teacher will have to go through the mark scheme and say 'you lost marks if you didn't round correctly' or 'this was how you should have got the correct answer', which you probably do anyway, so marking codes add nothing and take time.

And what a waste of time on questions where they have got full marks! They don't even have to show full working on a lot of questions to get full marks so how would you code that? Would you be expected to write the full set of codes instead of just 3/3?

Why have I got the suspicion that this marking policy is part of some whole school policy which ignores that maths is different?

For once noble it's not part of a mad school policy. Which gives me ammunition to go higher and say what a waste of time.

And yep a 3/3 would require M1 M1 A1 for example. Rather than just a circle around the number 3

According to the person who has implemented the policy it really worked in his old school. Therefore I should spend lots of time on it because "don't you want to benefit the kids?"

I would ask him how it particularly benefitted the kids to get M1M1A1 instead of '3' circled, because this is going to massively increase your marking workload and thus you need to be cutting back on other stuff.

'It really worked in his old school'.

Bet it didn't. What a crock.

Exactly what a crock indeed.

I point out that teachers with 4 ks4 classes would have a horrendous marking load.

He was so rude about it aswell. Like I was being lazy for not wanting to do it.

A visit to my line manager in the morning may be in order. Work life balance and all that.

Urgh, I hate it when people with a light teaching load come up with brilliant ideas to increase the workload of class teachers. All new ideas should be assessed for cost to benefit and it's not being lazy to do this.