In the UK and elsewhere, large-scale educational assessment agencies are shifting the mode of school examination marking towards having examiners mark examination scripts on screen rather than on paper. This shift has prompted questions about whether the mode of marking might influence examiner marking accuracy, particularly in relation to…

The question of what a doctorate is has been looked at before. The author argues that the issue of "doctorateness" is a recurring debate which needs to kept alive and revisited regularly. The aim of this article is to suggest five different areas or arenas in which the question can be addressed, forming a framework which can perhaps be…

In Ireland and the UK it is accepted practice that agencies with formal responsibility for delivering school examinations allow examination candidates, and in many cases their teachers, to see their examination papers once they have been marked. Returned papers can carry various pieces of information; as well as the total score given for a…

External music examiners play a significant role in assessing, verifying and maintaining musical standards. Educational output endorsed by external examiners serves to verify, modify and legitimise internal behaviour. This article examines some of the "inside practices" of external music examiners in the context of quality assurance. It…

This article investigates whether verbal protocol analysis is a sound methodology in the context of researching examination marking processes. As part of a larger study, six examiners marked fifty scripts at home and some further scripts during meetings (some silently and some whilst thinking aloud) for two A level examinations. Some scripts were…

This study investigated the functions of annotations, the role of annotations in markers' decision-making processes, whether annotations conform to conventions, and whether these vary according to subject area. Across subjects a number of scripts were analysed to survey which annotations are subject specific and which are more general. Twelve…

Technological innovation undoubtedly offers many potential benefits for education and the assessment of learning, which have been acknowledged elsewhere. One area that is relatively under-researched relates to the practice of how assessors interact with longer texts that are presented on screen. This is an important area of study because there…

Problems in the use of one-time external examiners to assess nursing students in clinical practice include overemphasis on individuals, lack of criterion referencing, input of clinical staff, halo effect, and cost. Continuous assessment, appropriately recorded, may be more satisfactory. (SK)

Presents a study that compared examiners' judgments of the grade-worthiness of candidates' A-level examination work at question paper level and at subject level. Suggests that examiners may have compensated to some extent for the different aspects of the subject tested in different question papers when they made holistic judgments. (CMK)