Piles of exam papers

Within a few days of the exam, your house will start to fill with piles of envelopes and exam scripts. Once you've received 300 to 400 scripts your total marking allocation for the next three weeks has arrived.

Make your own marking timetable

Simple arithmetic shows that you'll need to mark over 100 scripts a week to finish on time. Whether you have a full-time day job or not, the awarding body will expect you to keep up with your allocation.

One exam script should take between 15 and 30 minutes to mark. This means you'll need to set aside two to three hours each weekday evening for marking and up to six hours over a weekend to meet your deadline.

Creating your own marking timetable will help you keep to this demanding schedule. Divide a piece of paper into the number of marking days and write in times of working or family commitments. Next block-off one non-marking evening a week for recuperation. Finally divide your total number of scripts by the hours remaining, this will give you an approximate marking rate to aim at.

Where to mark

Your marker contract prohibits you from marking in public places. This means you'll have to mark during your lunch hour in private, or at home on the dining room table.

Removing half-marked scripts for meal times means that marking on the dining room table is not ideal. Taking over a home office or spare room for the duration is a better alternative, this way you'll be able to mark undisturbed.

Begin marking

Don't expect to reach maximum marking speed during the first few hours of marking. You'll need time to find your way around the range of possible mark scheme answers and those given by the candidates.

Depending on the subject examined, a written answer that exactly matches the mark scheme could be a rarity - the rest of the time you'll have to use your skill as an examiner to judge whether an answer is right or wrong.

Many of the potential answers you'll meet, and how to interpret them, will have been covered during the Standardisation Day. If you meet an answer that wasn't covered contact your Team Leader. Once they've got back to you with the official marking solution, complete marking that script.

With some answers it won't be the wording of the answer you'll have to interpret, it will be the handwriting. This may be so bad that it's unreadable. But persevere, although you have to mark what you see, you need to remember to give each candidate a fair mark for their work.

Adding up

As you mark each question, you'll write the awarded score in the relevant column. After marking the entire script you'll need to transfer the individual question scores to the front of the exam paper and then total these up for the final score.

Add up the marks using a calculator unless your mental arithmetic is reliable. If a family member is willing, ask them to double-check your totals as a safety net.