Since this newsletter began back in April, we’ve heard from The Secret Teacher on a variety of topics. For the next few editions, we’re going to hear from a new Secret Teacher, who has their own set of experiences to draw on. 

Over the next couple of weeks, they’re going to provide an in-depth look at how exams are marked in Scotland. This week, they look at how the system worked prior to the pandemic. 

Next week, they’ll be explaining how it changed.

The system has changed radically over the last two or three years. It had to because of the pandemic. 

At the same time there’s been a major review, and that’s concluded that the SQA is going to be reformed. It’s going to be completely rebranded and reorganised. 

Before Covid, the system worked really, really well. Every English teacher in the country who was marking the English paper that I marked would be invited to a markers meeting. They would all physically gather together, usually at a hotel in Glasgow or Edinburgh, and they would spend a day together working on the paper.

The Herald:

We would have access to the SQA samples. It would give us a selection of samples of pupils’ responses, and we would all pretend that we were marking them for real, in order to establish together ‘what is the standard that we’re trying to apply to every paper?’

We’re always grouped into teams for marking. We’ve got a team leader, and there are eight people in each team. The team leader’s job isn’t to mark papers, it’s to check papers. You attend the markers meeting, and after you leave you’ve then got qualification scripts to do. They refer to candidates’ exam papers as a ‘script’. You’ve got a set of qualification scripts to do before you actually mark any real papers. 

You get paid per paper that you mark and you don’t get paid at all if you don’t qualify, and some English teachers in theory never qualify. They just don’t meet the standard, and the SQA are quite strict. Their system doesn't really allow you to fail a number of qualifications. You have to pass some in order for the system to let you mark.

That’s the way that we used to do it. Once you get qualified, every 20 scripts that you mark (known as ‘seeds’), are a test of your marking. The paper’s already been marked. You’re being tested to see if you can get it right. 

You’re given a window of tolerance, so you could be two marks harsher or more lenient overall, but if you’re outwith that window you’re automatically put ‘on hold’. If you submit a seed that’s incorrect and doesn’t match the high heid yins’ marking, then you’re automatically put on hold. 

You’re not removed from marking at that point. You’re always told that being put on hold is a normal thing that will happen to every marker, and that’s an opportunity for you to reflect on everything that you were told during the markers meeting and getting qualified.

The Herald:

It’s your team leader’s opportunity to give you feedback, so they’ll generally give you a message, and they'll allow you to access the full commentary (there’s a full commentary that goes with every seed to justify why they’ve given the mark that’s been given) so you can view the commentary and hopefully you then come to the conclusion that they were right and you were wrong…

Once the team leader’s got the impression that you understand where you’ve gone wrong, they can take you off hold at that point and get you back marking. 

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But there are a number of markers who, for whatever reason, don't qualify, or stop marking during the process. I do what they call ‘Higher Paper 2’, so that’s candidates’ response to literature. They have to write an essay in response to any literature text – it could be William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or it could be Mean Girls – and they have to respond to a set of questions on a Scottish text that they’ve studied in class. That’s regarded as the most challenging English paper there is.

For that reason, a lot of markers stop marking that paper. It’s challenging to do, it takes a lot out of you, and you’re teaching at the same time. The money’s not amazing. You’re doing it for experience. 

I do it because every year, I go and teach Higher English better because of it, because I come out of it and I go ‘I could do that differently because I saw a teacher delivering it differently’, and the candidate is able to write a better essay or respond to their Scottish text in a different way.

It allows me to reflect as a teacher on how I can do better and better. 

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