Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
The Marks I Mark
An exam board clerk finds his red marks coming back to him in pencil, and a fresh rubric asking after candidates' homes that he does not remember having set.
- dated: "the marking season"
- narrator: "Gil Huxley, exam board clerk"
*Monday 8th June.* The marking season opened this morning in the long room above the office: three hundred and forty scripts, eight marking days on the printed schedule, red pencils issued from the tin and countersigned out to each of us. I mark against the scheme and sign each figure in the margin ledger. Mr. Ted Bloor takes the batch on my left, and Miss Ruth Vanner has the register and the clock.
*Thursday 11th June.* I went back over Tuesday's batch to check my totals and found the red gone from my figures. The same marks stand in the same places, correct to the scheme every one, but pencil now, sharpened to the board pattern. I did the arithmetic twice and the totals agree. The medium is not a thing the scheme examines, so there is no box on the tally for it, and I have said nothing, there being no form to say it on.
*Wednesday 17th June.* The new batch came with its rubric, and question seven asks the candidates to describe the street they live in, to say at which hour the street is quietest, and what the street keeps while it is quiet. Question seven is worth ten marks. My draft of the paper is in my own folder, dated the fourth of June, and carries six questions. The printed paper is dated the third, carries ten, and I do not remember setting what the printing remembers.
*Friday 19th June.* The candidates answer question seven the way they answer the sums papers, flat and proper. Streets from the roster of quarters, quiet hours mostly four o'clock, the street keeping its lamps or its dogs or the time. One script answers that the street keeps nothing but the hour, and the scheme, which I did not write, gives full marks for that line, and so I have given the marks.
*Friday 26th June.* Marking closed at four, every figure signed in pencil, the red tin countersigned back into the cupboard. I have marked in pencil since the second week, to match, and nobody at the board has remarked on the change, which is itself a kind of reply. The question of question seven went from me to Miss Ruth Vanner, from her to the secretary, and from the secretary to the rubric committee I sit on, and the committee has asked me when I set it. The season closes today and the question stays open with it: whose rubric the printing is, if the printing is nobody's.