Nearly a third of teachers thought the marking of exam papers in their GCSE subject was unfair this year, a survey has found.
A Teacher Tapp poll found that 31 per cent of the 5,166 state school respondents said they disagreed with the statement that the marking of exam papers in their subject was fair this summer.
English teachers were most likely to be dissatisfied with the quality of marking, with 67 per cent surveyed reporting that they thought the marking of papers in the 2024 exam series was unfair.
Furthermore, 48 per cent of languages teachers said they felt marking was unfair this year, while 38 per cent of arts teachers and 32 per cent of humanities teachers reported unfair assessment of papers.
‘Less stringent’ quality assurance
However, by contrast, the majority of maths (91 per cent) and science (88 per cent) teachers who responded to the survey said they believed marking was fair.
One humanities department head - who also works as an examiner - told Tes they believe quality assurance procedures have become “less stringent” in the last few years.
“I’ve had less contact with examiner team leaders over the course of a contract and standardisation has felt more rushed,” he said.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said it is “concerning” to see significant numbers of teachers dissatisfied with marking.
“The fact so many marking reviews are being requested, and that more than a fifth of these result in a change of grade, does suggest some inconsistency in the marking process,” he added.
A spokesperson for AQA said teachers can be assured marking was of an equally high standard to that perceived in maths and science across subjects, and it would be “wrong to suggest” nearly one in three scripts were marked inaccurately.
“So far, revised grades represent a tiny proportion of overall grades awarded to GCSE students in August,” the spokesperson added.
AQA said it saw remark requests in line with expectations this year. The exam board allows schools to see exam scripts for free; AQA received requests to see 770,000 scripts this year, compared with more than one million last year.
In addition, AQA said it hugely values the expertise of teachers who mark and it puts “a lot of emphasis on examiner training, standardisation and quality checks”.
An OCR spokesperson said: “We haven’t seen a significant change in the number of requests for reviews for GCSE subjects, including English, this year; it remains a very low proportion of the total number of entries.”
Exam boards charge for remarking if the grade does not change. For example, AQA charges £42 per unit or component for GCSE reviews, while Pearson charges £46.70 for a review of marking for GCSE.
Laura May Rowlands, a head of English, told Tes she and colleagues found several scripts with pages that had not been marked or where the mark scheme had not been applied properly among this year’s papers.
Ms Rowlands said that this led to teachers being forced to spend their free time contacting parents to get permission to return scripts for review.
She told Tes her department had returned more than 50 - mainly English literature - scripts to the exam board AQA for remarking this year, though only a few of these ended up seeing a change in grade.
Call for DfE to fund remarking costs
Inconsistency in marking results in extra workload for staff and costs for schools or their families if the grade does not change, Mr Di’Iasio said, as he called on the Department for Education to “fund any reviews of marking for disadvantaged learners”.
Ofqual publishes data on exam grade challenges and remarks each year. It is set to publish data on reviews of marking in December this year.
Writing for Tes last week, Dennis Sherwood, author of Missing the Mark: why so many school exam grades are wrong, and how to get results we can trust?, said around 20 per cent of marking challenges result in grade changes from marking errors each year.
However, despite the perception by some of marking being unfair, executive head David Blow, who is a fellow at the Association of Language Learning, said there had been no particular uptick in remarking requests reported to the association this year.
“We’re getting into the third year post-pandemic and grading has settled down now,” he told Tes. “For the last three years, it’s all been changing at a national level and it’s been very hard to take a view and compare with the year before.
“People are always more optimistic about results than how it actually turns out on the day.”
However, Mr Blow said the marking of languages papers has been “inconsistent” and “severe” for several years.
Ofqual asked exam boards to make positive adjustments at several grade levels for GCSE French and German this year to bring them more in line with Spanish results.
An Ofqual spokesperson said it expects exam boards to maintain a strong focus on marking quality, with strong quality assurance processes in place. Ofqual monitors and reports on these processes annually.
A spokesperson for the Joint Council for Qualifications said there are effective quality assurance procedures in place to ensure marking is to a high standard and examiners must undertake rigorous training. They added that checks are made throughout the process to ensure marking is of a consistent standard.
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