What is it?

You've posted back the marked scripts, but there is still one more job to do - writing your examiners' report. You'll use this end-of-marking report to show your thoughts on how well, or not, candidates answered the questions.

Your Team Leader will send a summarised version of your and the rest of your teams reports to the Chief Examiner. They in turn will use these summaries to write an overall Examiners' Report. This is published for all past and future candidates to refer to.

Use the form provided

Your awarding body will send you a blank examiners' report form. This will be accompanied with notes on how to fill it in.

You will be asked to write your thoughts on:

• how well candidates answered particular questions
• whether all questions were as likely to be answered
• any questions that weren't attempted at all
• administrative matters that were handled well or could be improved upon

and

• your opinion on how the marks relate to the grade boundaries.

The completed form will need to be posted or emailed back to your Team Leader within a week of the marking deadline.

What to put in your report

Having just marked several hundred question ones, twos and threes, you'll have a ready insight into describing how each question on the exam paper was answered.

Use this knowledge to summarise whether:

• the questions were answered correctly
• candidates actually answered the question given
• particular words or phrases appeared regularly

and you'll need to use your judgement here,

• if there were any questions that were ambiguously phrased, leading to candidates reading and answering a question the Chief Examiner didn't intend them to.

Exam papers go through several phases of writing and rewriting before they are released as live exam papers. Despite this, you may have noticed a question you thought was poorly written - so much so candidates interpreted it in a way that wasn't mentioned on your mark scheme.

If this occurs, write it in your report. Your observations will make sure next year's exam paper will be answered and marked more accurately.

Grade boundaries

Occasionally you will be asked to include where the grade boundaries should be when compared to the marks.

You may have spotted a pattern emerging of where the total paper marks were falling among the majority of the candidates. Some years the paper is answered particularly well and most candidates score over 70%, other years it falls below 50%.

Include these insights in your examiners' report to help the Chief Examiner award the As, Bs and Cs.

Send it off

Once you're happy with your report, send it off to your Team Leader. You probably won't get to see how your contribution was used before your Team Leader sends the team summary to the Chief Examiner.

The Chief Examiner now uses all the Team Leader reports to write the final Examiners' Report. If you want to view this, wait a few weeks before going to your awarding body's website and downloading it from there.