Should candidates be given their marked up papers back after examinations - the case for

Sushant Varma thinks it is a good idea for exam candidates to see where they have gone right - or wrong

Every year thousands of students take exams. Every year thousands of marks are awarded. As far as the students are concerned, that is the end of the matter. Very rarely, if ever, is an exam paper given back to students once it has been marked. There are many reasons why it should. The main reason is feedback. Students cannot be expected to improve if they don not know where they have gone wrong in taking the paper. A grade cannot tell you your mistakes or point out your strengths. The feedback gained from being able to study a marked paper can only be good for raising academic standards and pass rates, and therefore is essential.^1,2

Avoiding bias

Your university may have a system of anonymous marking, but is it effective? Giving papers back to students is the ultimate protection against allegations of bias. A survey carried out on medical students at a medical school in the United Kingdom showed that 23% of students believe that they could be deliberately failed despite anonymous marking.³ Returning papers after marking would abolish the need for an anonymous marking process, which can be very expensive to administer, and instead papers could be marked by name. Any bias would be detected when student receive their papers back, and there would be no more need to monitor failure rates by ethnic origin, which is very expensive.⁵

Naming exam papers also makes it easier to allocate marks. Not all students write their anonymous candidate numbers on papers. Many cannot remember what it is or simply forget to mark it down. Phone numbers, dates of birth, and even credit card numbers have been mistakenly written down in the past, instead of the candidate's specific number.

Rectifying mistakes

Returning exam papers also makes it easier to sort out mistakes. The universities mark hundreds of papers around exam time, and mistakes can be made. I was told of case where a student in America had received his papers back, with a letter telling him that he had failed. He looked at the papers and saw that he got 15/20, 17/20,15/20,14/20, and 16/20. The secretary had added up just the first two papers, and the student was given a mark of 32%. The mistake was rectified immediately, whereas under our system he would have had to resit his exams. I doubt whether any dean could guarantee a situation like this has never happened or will never happen with the anonymous marking system.

Examination by objective structured clinical exams (OSCEs) provides enormous scope for error. At the end of an OSCE all the papers are separated, and one examiner marks all the responses to a particular question; then the papers are put together and the marks added up. In an average year of 200 students, each taking 50 questions that are marked separately, mistakes are inevitable. If the papers were given back it would be much easier to correct these. Conversely, if the marking was error free it would be much easier to accept your given grade. Conflicts between students and examiners are all too common, and greater participation of students in the marking process would help to eliminate these problems.

Feedback

Feedback may help prevent failure when resitting an exam and in future exams. These are often the most stressful events in the medical school calendar, so the better prepared you are, the easier it is to cope.

A greater supply of questions

The main reason for not giving papers back is that the supply of good questions is always limited. Using modern technology, however, questions can easily be stored in a computer, which will then randomly select any combination from a given number. An academic who was the chief examiner for an A level board confirmed that his past papers were freely available. Questions were frequently repeated, especially those that discriminated well but, in spite of this, students still got them wrong.

Another way around the problem posed by a limited pool of questions is to ask students to design questions for exams. This would lead to an ever increasing pool of questions, prepared by medical students for their peers.

Recording oral exams

In exams that do not rely on a paper for marks - for example, clinical exams and vivas - the case is slightly different as there is no record of exam behaviour. The obvious answer to this would be to provide a record, by videotaping them, according to the General Medical Council's guidelines.

In short candidates in all disciplines at all levels should have their papers back once marked, and they should receive copies of any visual records of exams. Nothing less is acceptable.

Sushant Varma, final year medical student, Sheffield University Medical School


studentBMJ 1999;07 December ISSN 0966-6494

1. Rolfe I, McPherson J. Formative assessment. How am I doing? Lancet 1996;345:837-9
2. Lofgren M, Lundahl L. Self-marking in written examination: a way of feedback and learning. Med Educ 1996;30:322-5
3. Varma S. Medical student stress and welfare. (1999) Unpublished. Available free of charge from S.Varma@shef.ac.uk.
4. Commission for Racial Equality. Why keep ethnic records? http://www.cre.gov.uk(date visited 7 March 1999).
5. Samaritans. Exploring the taboo. http://www.samaritans.org.uk (date visited 5 March 99).
6. General Medical Council. Student Health and Conduct. http://www.gmc-uk.org (date visited 5 March 1999).