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'Disgraceful' OCR Marking - what's your experience?

Hi everyone!

So I was sent this link by a friend. It's basically an English Lit student challenging OCR's integrity in marking. In a nutshell, he had his paper remarked and increased by 21 marks, what he considers an absurd jump and indicative of an institutional problem in the way they mark papers.

I think he eloquently expresses a lot of what students of the last few years have experienced, namely unfair marking that requires us going through the remark system to fix, and quite rightly identifies that it's this sort of reckless marking (or marking that's perhaps pandering to a political agenda of lowering grades?) that puts the university places of thousands of students at risk every year.

However, I only have my own experiences and the anecdotes of other people at school to go by. Is this a typical story? Has anyone else had a similar experience with OCR or other exam boards in recent years?

I appreciate your comments.

Reply 1

Mr M

Study Forum Helper

Original post by Amorphous-blob

or marking that's perhaps pandering to a political agenda of lowering grades

This is not the case. The problem is simply incompetence unfortunately.

Reply 2

jamie092

When I got my AS and A2 results I saw classmates get similar jumps in grades, mostly in essay based subjects. It's partially because there's a lot of freedom in marking an essay; the mark scheme for these subjects have a bit more give in them than those for maths or physics. The effect is amplified at university, where there is often just one person marking your work. This is why it's so beneficial to have a good writing style, it gets the examiner on your side in cases where the awarding of a mark is ambiguous. Even examiners are subject to the halo effect!

Ideally they'd take some sort of average over the marks awarded by multiple examiners. I have no idea if of the extent to which they do this, but clearly something's going wrong. I just suspect that it's not down to bad mark schemes or bad training, but to the marking system and the nature of essay based subjects.

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 3

Toriar

Well I had OCR for sociology and the marking was fine, but I do think there is a problem when someone can send off for a remark and end up with 20 more marks than they had before. This may be an unpopular opinion but I would even be in favour of having exams a couple of weeks earlier or results a week later if it meant that things would be marked properly.

Reply 4

Old_Simon

This is the big benefit of doing STEM subjects.

Reply 5

Mackay

I've had a dreadful experience with AQA.

They marked me a C in my English Lit A-Level despite teachers recalling my paper and protesting that it was worthy of an A grade. External teachers from separate schools also backed them up, but AQA refused to re-mark it given the fact they would have to recall the marker's entire specification.

It's tough. All it takes is a new, relatively inexperienced marker having a bad day to affect their judgement. It could potentially ruin your career prospects.