THE Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) is utilising electronic marking or e-marking for some of its scripts for the 2014 May/June examination sitting.

The council, in a release yesterday, said it will be marking 11 papers in seven Caribbean Secondary Education (CSEC) subjects using the e-marking technology provided by the UK-based company, RM.

The seven subjects with papers being e-marked this year are Biology, Chemistry, Human and Social Biology, Integrated Science, Physics, Principles of Accounts and Principles of Business.

“As part of the preparation for e-marking, 22 chief examiners, assistant chief examiners and team assistants had their final training session last week at the CXC’s headquarters in Barbados by CXC and RM to use of the e-marking tool, called RM Results. The 22 persons were taken through the steps for the standardisation and script-marking processes using the RM Results e-marking software,” a CXC statement said yesterday.

The council said it will open the system for markers to commence live e-marking this Friday and markers who have been trained and who are approved for e-marking will have a four-week window to complete the scripts assigned to them.

“E-marking will help CXC to capture a lot more detailed information than we were able to do with paper-based marking, and improve our analysis of the examinations, down to the level of the questions,” said Brendalee Cato, assistant registrar for measurement and evaluation. “The accuracy of the scoring will improve and the likelihood of errors is significantly reduced since the system automatically calculates scores as the script is being marked,” Cato added.

In 2013, CXC used the e-marking software to e-mark two subjects: Integrated Science and Physics. These subjects were marked using both the traditional paper-based format along with the e-marking tool as part of the experiment. The result showed a high correlation between the scripts marked face to face and the same scripts marked using e-marking. This provided the confidence for CXC to increase the number of subjects and papers in 2014.

“CXC wishes to assure the public that the move to e-marking does not compromise its usual high standard of quality assurance. The e-marking solution enhances some of the quality assurance procedures and will result in more detailed analysis of examination performance,” said the release.