3rd February 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Probably much more than teachers, tutors tend to deal with the fall out when a student’s exams don’t go as well as hoped, and one of the options available to a student in that situation is to request that their exam be re-marked. Often the tutor will also give advice about whether to request a remark, because, of course, the grade could go down, and the tutor will have a feeling for whether the original grade ‘should’ have been higher.
Re-marking is not a new practice. Exam boards have to give students this option to add some quality control to their service. If a re-mark is requested then it’s usually done by a more experienced examiner, rather than any of the hundreds of examiners used, many of whom may not have much experience. However, if a student doesn’t request a re-mark initially, and if they ask for their exam paper back (which every student is entitled to do), the student is not subsequently allowed to request a re-mark.
Why is this important? Well Blue Tutors recently came across a case where an Edexcel A-level Maths paper had mistakes in the marking, but this was only discovered after the student had requested her paper back. The student had lost 4 marks in a module (just over 5%), and while this wasn’t on a grade boundary, it could affect the student’s final grade in 6 months time.
The tutor concerned was genuinely shocked. It is difficult to believe that one can find a mistake in the marking of a paper, and have no recourse to change the student’s result. With the ever increasing competitiveness for a university place, mistakes like the one mentioned above have never before had such an influence on a student’s future academic life, and their career.
Obviously we realise that examining boards have to have rules, and draw boundaries about how many times a paper can be re-marked, but when the marking is objectively wrong, surely it’s about time the examining boards accepted that clear mistakes must be corrected, whether the current rules say so or not.