Workload and English mocks

Posted on 22-07-2017

You can also read this post on the No More Marking blog here.

Last weekend, I posted a question to English teachers on Twitter.

Most of the answers were in the range of 10 – 30 minutes. People also pointed out that the time it took to mark mocks varied depending on whether you wrote lengthy comments at the bottom of each script or not.

My own experience of marking the old spec GCSE English Language papers was that it took me about 15 minutes to mark each paper, which included some fairly brief comments. I also found it difficult to mark for more than about 90 minutes / 2 hours in one go, and if I did try and mark for longer than that, I would get slower and need to take more frequent breaks.

If we take 15 minutes, therefore, as a relatively conservative estimate, that means that if you teach 28 pupils, it will take you 7 hours to mark those scripts. That doesn’t include any moderation. If we assume a 90 minute moderation session for each mock, plus 90 minutes to go back and apply the insights from moderation, that means we are looking at a total of 10 hours.

That’s for one English Language Paper. There are two English Language papers, and two English Literature paper. So if you want pupils to do a complete set of English mocks, that’s a total of 40 hours of marking for the teacher.

With the old specification which included a lot of coursework, I think most English teachers spent the bulk of year 10 teaching and marking coursework essays, and didn’t get on to doing mocks until year 11. I was really pleased when coursework was abolished as I felt it would free up so much more time for teachers to plan and teach, instead of mark and administer coursework. However, it does appear as though a lot of this gained time has now been replaced with equally time-consuming mock marking, with mocks being introduced more and more in year 10. Many schools have three assessment points a year. If you were to do two mock papers three times a year in both year 10 and 11, then a teacher who taught one year 10 class and one year 11 class would spend 120 hours of the year marking GCSE mocks. That’s three normal working weeks, or nearly 10% of the contracted 1,265 annual hours of directed time.

In our first No More Marking Progress to GCSE English training days last week, we looked at how schools could use comparative judgement to reduce the amount of time it took to mark an English mock paper. The exact amount of time it takes to judge a set of scripts using comparative judgement will depend on the ratio of English teachers to pupils in your school. But we think that at worst, using comparative judgement will halve the amount of time it takes to grade a set of GCSE English papers; that is, it will take 5 hours instead of 10. The best case scenario is that we can get it down to 2 hours. That includes built-in moderation, as well as time to discuss the results with your department and prepare whole-class formative feedback. You can read more about the pilot, and how to sign up for it, here.

Of course, workload is not the only issue we should consider when looking at planning assessment calendars and marking policies. At No More Marking, we like to evaluate the effectiveness of an assessment by looking at these three things.

  • Efficiency and impact on workload
  • Reliability – is the assessment consistent?
  • Validity – does the assessment allow us to make helpful inferences about pupils, and does it help pupils and teachers to improve?

In future blog posts, we’ll consider how reliable and valid traditional mock marking is. But for now, it’s clear that on the measure of efficiency, traditional mock marking doesn’t do that well.