How to standardise marking across an English department
Two teachers mark the same essay. One gives it a 3, the other a 4. Neither is careless — they are weighting different things, and nothing in the rubric told them not to.
8 min readMarking drifts because criteria are interpreted, not because teachers are inconsistent. Fix it with two habits: mark a shared sample together before each term so everyone calibrates against the same anchor, and use a small fixed set of criteria that nobody can quietly re-weight. Rewriting the rubric a third time will not help.
Why marks drift
It is rarely the descriptors. Two teachers reading "good range of vocabulary" will agree on what it means and disagree on how much it counts — one of them weighs ambition, the other weighs accuracy, and both believe they are following the same document.
- Different weighting. Everyone marks the same four criteria; nobody agreed how much each is worth.
- Different anchors. A teacher with a strong set marks to that set. The same essay lands differently in a weaker class.
- Drift over time. Marks in November and March are not the same marks, even from the same person.
- The halo effect. A tidy piece of handwriting from a reliable student reads as better writing.
You cannot write your way out of this. Every extra sentence of descriptor is another sentence to interpret differently.
The habit that fixes most of it
Marking a shared sample together, before the term starts, does more than any rubric revision. It takes forty minutes and it is the single highest-return meeting an English department runs.
- 1Everyone marks the same anonymised piece, alone. No discussion first — you need the honest spread.
- 2Put the marks on the board. The range is usually wider than anyone expected, and seeing it is the point.
- 3Argue about the middle one. Not the highest or lowest — the borderline piece is where the disagreement actually lives.
- 4Keep the sample. It becomes the anchor for the year. Next term, start by re-marking it and see whether you still agree with yourselves.
Fix the criteria, not just the wording
If one teacher folds vocabulary into grammar and another scores it separately, the two sets of marks are not comparable no matter how carefully the descriptors are worded. The criteria themselves have to be the same and separately scored.
- The same four criteria, scored separately, every time
- One shared anchor piece the whole department has marked
- A borderline example everyone has argued about
- A single holistic impression mark
- Criteria teachers can weight however they like
- Descriptors revised annually and never calibrated against
Four is about the ceiling. Beyond five, agreement between markers falls faster than the extra precision is worth — the added detail is spent on judgements tired people make inconsistently.
Where software genuinely helps
Not by marking better than your best teacher. By marking the same way every time, in every class, in March as in October.
In Dily every piece of writing is scored on the same four criteria regardless of which teacher set it or which class it came from. That gives a department something it usually lacks: a consistent baseline to disagree with. A teacher who thinks a piece deserves better now has a specific criterion to argue about rather than a general impression to defend.
- Marks across classes become comparable, because the criteria were applied identically.
- Drift over a term is visible, because the baseline does not drift.
- Calibration meetings get shorter — you are reconciling against a fixed point rather than against each other's memories.
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