As part of my exam role, at this time of year, I undertake reviews of marking. These are more commonly referred to as re-marks, which is a misnomer. Papers are not re-marked from scratch. Instead, they’re given to reviewers along with the original mark; the reviewer assesses whether the original mark can be defended. It’s not about what mark they would give it or even if they agree with the original mark: it’s whether, given what is written on the markscheme, the original mark can be judged as reasonable. As you might imagine, this results in far fewer mark changes than if somebody was marking from scratch, particularly on essay-based subjects where there will always be a small amount of subjectivity, as long as the papers are marked by humans, anyway.

Some things I have read and heard from colleagues this year about mark reviews include:

* Put them all in if they’ve missed by one mark.
* You’re only 5 marks from the next boundary so it’s worth a try.
* Buy the paper back and read it.
* I’m sure we can find her one more mark, it’s worth getting all the papers done.
* If they’ve missed a mark on each question that could be the difference between a grade.

All of these points demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the mark review process and, every year, I find myself deeply frustrated by the amount of public money poured into what is essentially a gamble. Let’s take them one at a time –

“Put them all in if they’ve missed by one mark” – it makes no difference how many marks away from a grade boundary the student is. Depending on the way the mark review is done, it might even be less likely to move if it is only one mark that is needed. I realise this is common practice among lots of schools and I have strong Opinions on the sort of senior leaders who promote this method. One of those opinions is that they should spend the money they spend on mark reviews on things like teaching assistants and revision resources, instead. Why is there money to pay for reviews and not cover paid interventions?

“You’re only 5 marks from the next boundary so it’s worth a try” – possibly, but will the next grade up really make a big difference? I understand if it’s a 3 to a 4. When you’re talking about moving from a 7 to an 8, I’m less clear. A 7 is a great grade.

“Buy the paper back and read it” – excellent advice but please, let’s stop saying buy the paper back – all exam papers for English quals are free to view with the permission of the student and have been for some time. With this in mind – please consider doing this before asking for a mark review. You might be puzzled as to why a student scored highly across all questions except one and finding out that they only wrote one sentence for that one would save time and money. I’m never going to complain about having to review a blank script that scored 0 marks but the waste does make me want to cry a bit.

“I’m sure we can find her one more mark, it’s worth getting all the papers done” – the mark reviewer will not be looking for an extra mark. Their job is not to tip students into the next grade. Their job is to review the original marks and confirm the mark can be justified. I think we are also guilty of miscommunicating the process to students, who then feel very unfairly treated because ‘they only needed to find me one more mark’. No GCSE exams are marked like this – grade boundaries are set for whole qualifications and only after the marking is complete. There are always going to be cut-offs. It’s not personal.

“If they’ve missed a mark on each question that could be the difference between a grade” – this is obviously true but I have included it anyway. This is reiterated to all the examiners for the qualification I work on, in every meeting, every year, as a reminder that we don’t hold back marks just because we think a candidate should have written a specific fact or they’ve written one wrong thing in a long essay of right things. That said, if they haven’t made it up a mark across the board, the chances are, their grade is accurate. If a student consistently scores at a mid mark on all questions, a mid grade is the right one. It can be heartbreaking when a student has worked super-hard and hasn’t quite made it. But this is the system we have. It’s a system where 30% of students are not going to make it to a grade 4 or above. And a system where more accessible papers are going to lead to higher grade boundaries. That’s the system that was created following the Ofqual consultation on GCSEs a decade ago. Not many teachers engaged with it. I wonder if that will be the case next time?

There are times when you know a grade is wrong and that’s what mark review is for. I will be forever annoyed that I didn’t more strongly encourage an A-level student to get her mark reviewed on the Tudors paper a couple of years back: I know she did better than the mark she got and I am 99% certain the mark would have gone up. A few years before that, one of my year 11s converted from an E to the C we were certain he had been working at leading up to the exams. Past horror stories of whole sections of papers going unmarked are much rarer these days, with the advent of online marking, but technical mishaps do still happen; papers sometimes go missing; extra pages get paired with the wrong section of the paper. It’s important to have a process for mark review, to fix these things.

But pouring what amounts to thousands of pounds worth of education funding into a punt? I do not think this is a priority, given current funding levels in education. I think it undermines the exams system by suggesting that the original marking is of such poor quality that it should be challenged en masse. I think it tacitly teaches our children that better results can be paid for. It creates a further layer of inequality between schools that can afford to channel their money into endeavours like this and schools that can’t.

I’ve been involved in mark reviews for well over a decade now. Every year, the number of reviews I am allocated has gone up by a small amount – a few dozen, 50 at most. Last year, it more than doubled. Nobody is going to complain: exam boards make money, schools receive a small handful of positive changes and chalk the negative changes up to bad luck. I just wish there was somebody who was looking more closely at this practice.