Marking Junior and Leaving Cert papers is a task many teachers take on – but it's not the easiest way to make a few bob, they tell Conor Power
DURING THE month of July, while most secondary school teachers are making the most of their summer break, a section of them – like the silent crack commando squad of the secondary education system – continue to work anonymously in homes across Ireland. Their pivotal role is to ensure that, in August and September, respectively, the papers of all the Leaving and Junior Certificate students in the State will be correctly marked and catalogued.
“The main reason I did it to start off with was to get an understanding myself of the marking schemes.” So says John Heneghan, a Mayo-born secondary school teacher who marked Junior Certificate accountancy papers every summer for 20 years.
“At that time [in the early 1980s], marking schemes were like top-secret documents: another teacher could not tell you what the marking scheme was and as soon as you had finished correcting, the marking schemes had to be sent back to the Department. It’s only in the past five or six years that they’ve opened up the marking schemes to everybody.
“I was amazed. Simple little things like dates and folio numbers and stuff that I would have been careless about were making up maybe 4 or 5 per cent of the paper . . . the weaker kids were able to pick up marks for relatively nothing, while my better kids were losing marks because they didn’t put those things in.”
Cork secondary school teacher Seán Murphy was similarly motivated: “I wanted to see what way they marked exams so that I could facilitate my own teaching around it and maximise points for my own students.”
“Money was the reason initially – I first did it the year I was getting married,” says a Waterford-based teacher who prefers to remain anonymous and marked papers for almost 20 years. “I needed a few bob then and it was habit more than anything else after that . . . they would send you out a form along the lines of ‘you have been re-appointed’, working on the assumption that you would do it again.”
All markers attend a marking conference in Athlone, at which the marking scheme relevant to their subject is laid bare and all aspects of the task fully explained. At the end of the conference, the markers drive in convoy to a nearby depot to pick up their bag of randomly-selected scripts (depending on the subject, it can be up to 400).
“You’re probably working seven days a week most of the time, over 24 days. The work itself wouldn’t be difficult – it’s the sheer length of time you spend at it . . . it could be eight or nine hours a day,” says the Waterford teacher.
“It’s the hardest work youll ever do,” says Heneghan. “It is unbelievably intense: you’ve got to be so careful with it.”
Pay rates are based on a per-paper basis and vary significantly, according to the subject and the level, from about €5.50 per paper for higher-level Junior Cert mathematics to up to about €30 per paper for higher-level Leaving Cert English.
“If you work it out per hour, it’s not well paid,” says the Waterford teacher. “Having said that, you’re out of circulation for three to three-and-a-half weeks so you’re not spending money, and you get a nice lump sum at the end of August.”
Many would consider the secondary-school teacher’s three-month holiday break one of the best perks of the job, and marking papers comes right in the middle of it.
For Heneghan, it was this disruption that finally pushed him to give up. “You spend the whole month of June dreading it, the month of July doing it and you’re drained for the month of August. It wrecked the whole summer.”
With regard to the fairness of the marking system overall, the general impression seems to be of a system that, while not without its faults, is fair and well-run.
“They put a lot of effort into having consistency,” says the Waterford marker, explaining how the supervising examiner would systematically go through a randomly selected sample of papers and ensure the marker was following the marking scheme correctly.
Most of the markers I spoke to defended the practice as a sound policy of checks and balances and on the grounds that it was applied across the board to every student.
The only potential issue here is when Irish students are competing for the same university places with students from another educational system where the marking scheme allows for a different set of statistics.
This, according to one of the markers, was one of the very reasons for the much-publicised grade inflation at Leaving Cert level with the percentage of A grades in mathematics having crept up to a level similar to that of the UK secondary system.
“I honestly think the marking scheme is very, very good,” says Heneghan.
“What I love about the system is that Johnny from the back-of-beyond and Johnny the millionaire’s son sit down as two numbers in one centre and the guy correcting those two papers hasn’t got a clue whose papers he’s correcting. It’s totally free from influence.”
The same teacher readily admits that the weight of responsibility at Leaving Cert level was a little too much for him and he stuck to Junior Cert, where his marking decisions might have less impact on people’s lives. Others, such as the Waterford marker, didn’t find this burden too heavy.
“You just follow the scheme as best you can. I think most people are very conscientious about it and the system is there to prevent you being too generous or too mean with your marking.”
In any case, the marking business is not without its moments of humour, as Heneghan recalls: “Years ago, on a business studies paper, someone had written on the inside of the first page (and this was all he had written): ‘You must be a sad f***er if this is all you want to do during your summer holidays!’ I got a laugh, but I got paid for looking at it anyway.”
