'If I was a new marker, I would have struggled and been none wiser'

Exam marking really does require complete concentration, and it does require experience.

I only know how to mark well because of experienced markers who came before me, who shared their experience, and we need a system where the exam board facilitates that. 

If you’re going to take part in the exam marking then you’re going to have to go through that painful process, and it is difficult. I remember being at early markers meetings and getting things wrong. You have to go in there with your ego removed to an extent, and keep reminding yourself that the process is not about you, although it feels personal sometimes when you’re saying ‘here’s why I would give this such and such’ and you’re being told ‘well no, you’re wrong and here’s why’. 

That is difficult to take at first, but the point is that it’s never about you personally. You should always be reminded that you’re part of a team and a supportive structure where we’re all here to help each other. That’s what got me through when I was a young marker, and now I’m more confident and experienced because I had somebody next to me who was kind and supportive getting me through it. 

I’d like to give that back, and share that experience each year. It makes exam marking much more pleasurable if you get that interaction with other markers. For the last two years it has felt a more isolated process.

Had I been a new or even newish marker, I would have significantly struggled. I don’t think I would necessarily know that I was struggling. There are probably a lot of inexperienced markers out there who just don’t understand the process properly yet, and I really hope Qualifications Scotland take that into account. 

Once you’ve done your marking, you feed back to senior leaders via a markers report, where you answer questions like ‘did you find responses were as good as/better than/not as good as last year?’ and ‘have you got any feedback in terms of things we could do differently?’. 

David Swinney is one of the English senior leaders, delivering a lot of the English exam content to markers. He was leading National 5 and underlining that they make efforts to read every single markers report and it’s vital to them in terms of how they do it the following year. 

It would be very interesting to get a sense of what markers are feeding back regarding. There would probably be a huge contrast between more experienced markers who are very cautious and saying ‘we need in-person markers meetings’, and new markers who haven’t a clue that it’s really important.

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I suspect there’s probably a 50/50 split between new markers saying ‘yeah everything was really fun and great, and we had a good time marking’, and more experienced markers saying ‘we really need to change this for the future, this is a bit worrying’. 

In theory, every school presenting exam candidates for SQA should be regularly getting staff to mark pupil work together, to emulate the discussions we have as markers at SQA, in order to establish clearly in teachers’ minds the national standard to be applied. 

In reality, the most successful, well-run schools I’ve worked for or know of do this lots; less well-organised or successful schools tend to give staff less opportunities to do this, limiting their opportunities to become confident in delivering exam course content effectively. This ultimately impacts how well SQA markers across Scotland can do their job.

I had an interesting one this year with seeds (responses that senior examiners have previously reviewed). It turned out, the seed that I got was incorrect. The seed that went out missed one of the responses that the candidate had made. I had given it the mark, and I think I’d given another mark somewhere else. You get ‘incorrect’ if you’re way out, and it flags you as red. It flagged me as amber, or orange, because I had given this one mark which hadn’t been given originally.

It went all the way up the chain, came back down and my team leader told me the senior folk all agree it should have actually been awarded and it wasn’t. They said the seeds have all had their marks awarded and they can’t be changed, so the team have said ‘that’s really, really good that you’ve spotted that one but we can’t change it’. 

Sometimes it’s just getting that message across that English is subject to human error, and even the high heid yins get things wrong. 

The seeds are quite daunting at times, especially if you get one wrong. That was quite reassuring as a marker in a way. It’s good to have it reinforced that it’s human beings making these decisions. Sometimes things get missed. Hopefully that mark wasn’t absolutely vital.

I suppose it’s useful to see the system’s not perfect. The philosopher Voltaire used to say ‘the best of all possible worlds’. It’s the best way that we can approach a difficult task, but it is flawed, and I suppose that was just proof this year that there are sometimes flaws we can’t do anything about.

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