Dubai - Edexcel, which pioneered the concept of online marking of examination papers pertaining to General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) only for UK schools last year, would go for online marking of three million answer scripts of schools not only based in UK, but also outside including perhaps the UAE this year.
Revealing this, Stevie Pattison-Dick, Media Affairs Manager, Edexcel, UK, said AQA, one of the three boards in charge of marking papers for the GCSE examinations, would also be doing online marking of around 300,000 papers.
"But, Edexcel's process is different from AQA," she said, adding that Edexcel had introduced a technology-based approach to marking and processing examinations online which does not require the examination papers to physically leave the shores of UK. Examination papers are electronically scanned so that they can be checked on-screen and stored on computers by markers.
She ruled out any affect of online marking on the quality and standards of British education system. In fact, the technology, she says, will allow markers to look at multi-choice or essay questions without having to deal with mountains of paperwork.
She also claimed that the process involves greater transparency in marking system, increases speed with papers being marked by two or more examiners simultaneously, besides reducing the time taken to publish results. In addition, examination papers are sorted out electronically, reducing the risk of lost papers.
UK's leading examining and awarding bodies were responding to a report published recently in the Daily Telegraph that AQA, this year, had signed a contract to scan some 500,000 answer papers in history, French, German and Italian, and have them e-mailed to a firm in India.
Meanwhile, an official of the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), another leading examining and awarding body in the UK, said the board was yet to decide on outsourcing examination papers.
"Haven't heard of outsourcing and to the best of my knowledge, CIE has not yet considered outsourcing GCSE and other examination papers for marking outside the UK," the official said.By Meraj Rizvi
© Khaleej Times 2005
