How are examiners "guesstimating" marks?

On other threads there is talk of examiners losing papers or not marking them properly, therefore they end up guessing marks! How do they do this? Is it by looking at your predicted grade (I don't even know if they have access to that!) or by simply awarding grades randomly to make up the numbers?
This really frustrates me - what's the point of working hard for years when you're not even going to be rewarded for your efforts? :frown:

Reply 1

Kill3er

Don't worry about it.

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 2

Steeplechasing

To be fair, marking arts subjects exams involves a bit of guesswork anyway from markers.

Reply 3

hha98

It's really frustrating! Do you know what exam boards this is happening in?

Reply 4

thecatwithnohat

"oh I love the way she writes her Gs, A* piece of work right here."

Reply 5

sunnyl

Original post by hha98

It's really frustrating! Do you know what exam boards this is happening in?

I don't really know but potentially every board will have a handful of examiners who don't mark accurately! OCR seems to be the biggest culprit though according to the newspapers...

Reply 6

hha98

I remember the WJEC totally messed up the English Language GCSE grades about a year or two ago. I'm losing my faith in the exam boards a bit.. :frown:

Reply 7

KatieAlicexxx

Original post by hha98

I remember the WJEC totally messed up the English Language GCSE grades about a year or two ago. I'm losing my faith in the exam boards a bit.. :frown:

Yeah, the WJEC was last year. It screwed up literally everyone in my year, and 50% of us had to retake English language. Luckily I wasn't one of them and got an A in both Lit and Lang!

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Reply 8

hha98

Original post by KatieAlicexxx

I was one of the lucky ones too! I was really shocked at that though, lol. I got an A and a B.

Reply 9

sunnyl

Original post by hha98

I was one of the lucky ones too! I was really shocked at that though, lol. I got an A and a B.

How did they mess it up?

Reply 10

hha98

Original post by sunnyl

How did they mess it up?

I'm not sure how exactly, but I vaguely remember there being a question where you'd have to analyse two articles, both of which were about theme parks, then you'd write about a teenagers response or something. I can't remember much at all, but they were crazy strict on their marking from what I heard. I got told that you'd drop 2-3 marks if you said "people" instead of "teenagers" and stuff like that. They just took strict marking to a whole new level!

Reply 11

Gogregg

This is just scaremongering. Don't worry about it.

Reply 12

aamirac

Well people can say markschemes never really are accurate themselves.

Reply 13

sunnyl

Original post by Gogregg

This is just scaremongering. Don't worry about it.

I'll try my best not to and just accept what I receive on the day!
Is there any truth in the newspaper articles about the corrupt exam boards?

Reply 14

InkedPage

I'm trying to look at it as scaremongering, however after my experience with OCR last year I wouldn't be too sure.
Everyone in my RS class got exactly the same mark and the same UMS except one person who got pretty much perfect marks. Other people in the class were expected to get higher/the same marks as this one person, and the rest of the marks were all Ds with the exact same UMS. Just on the first paper, the second paper actually reflected the expected results more accurately. It was never investigated by my teacher because half of the class was expected to fail and they didn't want to risk an investigation where they would have this result...It was all just a mess and seemed suspicious to me. Other teachers even said to me it should have been investigated.

Then again every year something seems to go wrong, or is reported to, so really I don't know why I'm that surprised anymore... :frown:

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 15

sunnyl

Original post by InkedPage

That does sound suspicious! What was the average mark in the class then?

Reply 16

InkedPage

Original post by sunnyl

That does sound suspicious! What was the average mark in the class then?

Well there wasn't really an average mark since everyone except from one person had the exact same mark in paper one. My results averaged to a C because I got a high B in the second paper (and even that was questioned as being low when the script came back) and a D in the first paper. The second paper varied wildly from the first.
On top of the strange results my college has issues with the particular teacher who taught us, so not a lot was done about the results...It all just added up.

Reply 17

Gogregg

Original post by sunnyl

I'll try my best not to and just accept what I receive on the day!
Is there any truth in the newspaper articles about the corrupt exam boards?

The one you probably saw was from last year, but there is a little truth to it, but not enough to get you worried, that only happens in a very small amount of cases, and every year there are these stories which are just plain scaremongering.