The days of physically sending scripts etc. half way (or indeed all the way) around the world are numbered. In May this year the IB is introducing e-marking for the first time in Chemistry. Scripts will be sent to a central base, scanned and then sent digitally to assistant examiners. In May this year e-marking will be limited initially to Paper 2 - Paper 3 will still be marked the old way.

The only obvious difference that the students will see is that whereas before they had one or more (dotted) lines in which to write their answers, these lines will now be encased in a box.

To illustrate how this will work, last year’s paper has been put on the OCC formatted with the new changes. Some of the problems that the system will need to be able to cope with are how to deal with the student who writes outside the box or continues to answer the question on an attached separate piece of paper. 

There are clear advantages to e-marking. The most obvious being the cost – both economic and environmental. In future examiners may well mark just one or two questions, not the whole school and moderation will take place during this marking as they must mark within the same range as the Principal examiner who will have already marked a few of the boxes unbeknown to the assistant examiner. If the assistant examiner’s marks do not lie within this range their marking will not count and the boxes remarked by someone whose marking is in accordance with the standard set by the Principal examiner. This should help to ensure a more uniform standard of marking and eliminate bias as different questions from the same student will be marked by different examiners.

However there are some disadvantages and care will be needed to ensure that candidates (and schools) are not disadvantaged. For example, several boxes will need to be ‘lumped together’ so that 'Error Carried Forward' can be used correctly. Care will be needed to avoid penalising candidates more than once on the whole paper for incorrect use of significant figures and units. Also, by not marking all the papers (and questions) from one school, examiners will not be so aware of schools with problems and it may be harder to spot cases of plagiarism or other forms of cheating. Candidates and schools also need faith in the system that all the marked boxes will be properly correlated. An example of what can go wrong came to light only yesterday when it emerged that 146 students in the U.K. were given the wrong A level grade, resulting in 13 of them being denied a place at university. This was because of a failure in the examination board’s online marking system.