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Ed Offer

Sunday 15 January 2006

I found my first experience of marking Prelims difficult and time-consuming. Marking an answer in History involves taking into account many different factors in a candidate’s response e.g. process, recall, presented evidence, developed thinking as well as an overall evaluation. Having gone through the marking schemes with AH (PT) and compared marked answers I sat down several times over the hols with a pile of papers shouting at me to mark them.

GW and GC advised that the best way to mark was to take it one question at a time – mark all answers to question 1 then go onto question 2 and so on. This was much better than wading through each answer paper one at a time.

I’ve also created an excel spreadsheet to track the result and have put in a formula to automatically calculate the candidates percentage and grade, saving me a few hours with a calculator! Moreover as it is in Excel, you can produce snazzy graphs and tables to look a real swot!! Get in touch if you’d like a copy of the template spreadsheet.

Overall the results were pretty much as expected although some performed worse than expected. I’ve been going through the paper this week using a selection of model answers to questions they found difficult. I also photocopied some examples of their answers and got them to mark them in class. This aimed to give pupils a clearer idea of what examiners are looking for and give them an example answer to compare with their own efforts. I’ll definitely be doing this again.

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