Examination Marking - Focus on Quality
e-Marker® enables enhanced quality control as the restrictions of paper-based marking are removed. The use of images enables individual questions to be segmented and marked separately, bringing the following benefits:
- improved marking quality - markers are able to concentrate on an individual question at a time
- marking bias is reduced and reliability increased - more than one marker marks an individual candidate’s script
- anonymity is maintained as markers do not know who’s answer they are marking
- markers who mark outside set tolerances are stopped from marking individual questions until they can be retrained. This is achieved by comparing the marks that markers give to questions that have been marked already by a senior marker and which are presented anonymously to markers during the marking day (known as ‘seeds’).
Once all marking is complete, no further quality control measures are needed. The marks awarded are accurate, robust and reliable.
Research conducted by DRS and the NFER (National Foundation for Education Research) on five GCSE subjects (Geography, French, ICT, Mathematics and Science) examinations showed that there was:
- exact agreement between markers and the seeded questions of between 79% to 98.7%
- agreement to within one mark of between 91% to 99.4%