The Leaving Cert: It’s in the bag. Inside State Exams HQ

For students, the ordeal is over. For examiners, the work is just beginning. Over 1.9 million individual test items, including written examination scripts and project work, are assessed each year under the auspices of the State Examinations Commission.

It resembles a military operation not just in scale but also security and secrecy surrounding the distribution of scripts.

The process could be witnessed his week at the commission’s headquarters in Athlone, where hundreds of English subject examiners queued up to collect their appointed papers.

Each must bring ID and sign for their allocation, which are secured in individual bags, colour-coded yellow, green, orange or blue depending on whether it is Leaving or Junior Cert, higher or ordinary.

There are no identifiers on the paper, other than the student number, and likewise the identity of examiners is protected in the process.

Marking rates

Some 6,722 examiners have been employed to mark the exams across all subjects, comprised of 4,362 written examiners, 1,122 oral examiners and 1,238 practical examiners.

No examiner is allocated papers from their school or home county. Each receives a bundle ranging from several dozen (for minority subjects) to several hundred, depending on the subject, the level of examination, whether it was done through Irish, and whether it is Junior Cert or Leaving Cert.

“The chief examiner monitors how many papers need to be marked each day. For a very complex paper, you might only do five a day but for a Junior Cert paper you could mark 25 a day. It depends on the subject,” said an SEC spokeswoman.

Four weeks

Before collecting the papers, the examiners attend a conference with the SEC’s chief examiner to go through the marking procedure. For Leaving Cert English and Maths this conference runs over two days due to the complexity of the exam.

The examiners liaise with an advisory examiner and the chief examiner before returning the scripts within a four-week timeframe.

Once they are returned, SEC staff input the marking sheets electronically, double-keying the results to minimise the risk of error.

The work of each examiner is monitored by an assigned advisory examiner, and a sample is assessed to ensure consistency in marking.

Leaving Certificate results will be issued on Wednesday, August 12th and the online results service will be available from noon on that day.

Junior Certificate results will be issued in mid-September, with the online results service available from 4pm on that day.