Welcome to my World!

A day of online marking. Welcome to my world! It’s the last day of the month and so was trying to get as much done as possible today.

Edit: am adding a bit more info. These ‘graphs’ are what examiners see when marking speaking tests, together with the questions, photos etc, which make up the rubric. You don’t have to look at these graphs at all while marking, but they give an indication as to how much the test taker is going to speak and let you know how long they’ve got to go till they finish. In fact, I sometimes walk around while marking, wearing my ear pods, and if it’s not too hot I can sit on the patio. As you have to input a mark at the end of each test though - every couple of mins roughly - you can’t really do much else!

Examiners don’t mark the whole test for each candidate, but only one part of the test. So I might mark speaking part 1, and three different examiners will mark parts 2, 3, 4 etc. This should make the marking more objective as some test takers do better in one part than another and so you aren’t influenced by their performance in the other parts.

Every 5th or 6th test is what we call a ‘control item’ and so it has already been marked. If an examiner doesn’t mark this accurately and ‘within tolerance’ you get suspended from marking that particular test type and you have to review it, say why you gave it the original mark and justify the new mark. If your new mark is within tolerance, the suspension is lifted and you can continue to mark that type of test. If it’s still wrong, then you have to do some retraining and pass a standardisation. As examiners, we also get moderated every few months: this is when a senior examiner moderates a selection of our marking (not the control items) to ensure accuracy of marking and we get a detailed report on these.

I find it interesting to see how test takers from around the world answer the same questions and of course you have to tune into different accents and not be influenced. I can obviously understand the Spanish speakers more easily and understand what they want to say, even when there are mistakes, better than, e.g. Chinese test takers, and so need to be careful. There are also some funny things happen, e.g. the occasional test taker just decides to sing or hum for the duration of the test or just says, ‘la la la la’! In some parts of the world, you can hear cocks crowing and cattle noises in the background, while in others you hear the noise of planes and heavy traffic. And like in all tests, there are attempts at cheating!