If you or your bae/sibblings/BFF/mandem/cousin didn’t get the A-Level results they were hoping for, you can take solace in this news. And if you did pass, maybe just ignore this.
The Guardian interviewed an anonymous exam marker, and they didn’t paint a very good picture of marking process. Basically he said that they get paid £4 per paper they mark, so they rush through them, and that can lead to plenty of mistakes “Examining is a ruthless multi-million pound business… The faster we mark, the more we get paid.”
Most damning though was their claim that the higher-ups would just come and change things: “I’ve seen a chief examiner take a set of papers from an aberrant marker and come back minutes later with new grades. Usain Bolt couldn’t have moved at that speed. The examiner had clearly just looked up the school’s predicted grades and scribbled them on top of the papers.”
There are even more horror stories. One examiner was sacked but kept coming back—and his marking was all over the place. “Some scores are too generous, some are too mean and there is no pattern.”
But we’re sure you deserved your grades.
