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 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 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.

CXC will open the system for markers to commence live e-marking on Friday 20 June 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,” explained Mrs Brendalee Cato, Assistant Registrar – Measurement and Evaluation working

on e-marking. “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,” Mrs 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.