Let’s get one worry out of the way immediately. Examiners are not out to penalise students. The very idea suggests that examiners would take away from students something they already have. When it leaves you, your examination script has yet to gain any marks, so there is nothing to take away from it. Be assured that the role of examiners is to add marks, not to take them away. Using a standardised mark scheme, they add marks by crediting correct answers to questions set in the examination papers. So what you have to do is make sure that examiners can clearly see that you have the knowledge and skills required to answers those questions correctly.
In the summer of 2018, the two examination boards with the highest number of candidates supervised the marking of nearly 150 000 A-level biology scripts. Clearly, marking these scripts involved large teams of examiners. This raises another key point about the work of examiners, as each member of an examining team is required to mark in exactly the same way. Examination boards have procedures in place to ensure this is the case. These procedures include training examiners to apply the mark scheme correctly before starting to mark scripts and then monitoring their application of the mark scheme throughout the marking period.
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