Black marks

It is August and the A-level results are being handed out at Wolverhampton Grammar School. Pupils queue up outside the deputy head's office before entering one by one to sit on a comfy chair to be told their fate. So it is that James Esland hears he has missed out on a place to read physics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, by just three percentage points – the result, he is convinced, of a rogue grade from the OCR exam board.

The 17-year-old had expected to get an A grade in his design and technology A-level, and his teachers agreed. James is a national award-winner in the subject, after all. But an unexpected E in one paper put the necessary grade beyond his grasp, so he will be going to Edinburgh University to read software design instead.

He and his teachers are among the many who have been left feeling baffled and betrayed this summer by an examination system that previously claimed to be a gold standard, ensuring consistency from year to year. The chaos of this year's A-level results has taught James a different lesson: that the process is far from as scientific as he thought.

Once his script left the exam hall it embarked on a journey of Byzantine complexity, depending at every turn on personal judgements and corporate revisions. His mother knows all about such things. Diana Esland is an examiner in English with the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), the biggest of the three main boards. The process is, she says, a grim one. The colour-coded envelopes start flopping through letter boxes around the country almost the day after the students have escaped from the exam hall.

There are 50,000 people who mark A-levels in Britain. Each has 200-300 papers to deal with, for around £3 a script – roughly equivalent to what you get paid for stacking shelves at a supermarket. "You have to be either keen to get to the top of the examination tree or desperate for the money," says Mrs Esland. "If you're trying to fit it around full-time work then you end up in the twilight hours. It's difficult to maintain an even playing field. Some subjectivity is inevitable, particularly if you're tired."

There are checks, of course, many of them. Markers are not allowed to start in earnest until they have attended a standardisation meeting, often held in London. There, the chief examiner and the principal examiners – the people who wrote the questions – hand out examples of answers, good, bad and unpredicted, and the marking system is explained in detail. All the markers are taken on for a trial run, and the more erratic ones are weeded out. The rest then spend three frantic weeks at the end of June wielding a red pen, totting up raw marks and sending samples back to headquarters to be checked.

Meanwhile, thousands of clerical workers – mainly university students employed by the hour – labour in vast sorting centres, checking the scripts and arranging them in strict order, by school and candidate, on miles of shelving. The AQA has a purpose-built hall in its Guildford offices. The Edxcel board uses a converted factory in north London.

Early July is when people like Father Tony Dearman get busy. Fr Dearman, a Catholic priest, is the chief examiner for the AQA's Specification A Maths paper. Having written the questions, he now leads the crucial awards meeting at which the raw marks are converted into grades. Together with his deputies and clerical officers from the exam board, Fr Dearman decides how easy or hard the paper is in comparison with the previous years, and where the "grade boundaries" should be set.

This mysterious process is at the heart of people's fears about the whole system. In theory a candidate's total mark is determined by the quality of his or her answers – but in practice a mark that gets an A grade one year might not be enough the next, because the threshold has been raised. This has long been standard practice, but the suspicion now is that exam boards have been heavy-handed with the adjustments and unfairly downgraded some results for political reasons, namely to avoid criticism that there are too many A grades. Faced with uproar from parents and students and demands to have every paper marked again, the Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, has ordered an independent inquiry into the exam chaos.

Fr Dearman, a former maths teacher at an independent school in Manchester, is confident that he came under no external interference from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the Government's exams quango: "There was someone from the authority at the award meeting, but he didn't say anything." Other chief examiners tell a different tale – including one who privately admits he came under pressure from his board to make the exam harder this year, and that the board had been bullied by the QCA.

Fr Dearman is more bothered by the shortage of examiners. What used to be a sideline for experienced teachers has become a job in its own right, requiring him to work at weekends. Next month he will attend another three-day meeting as the maths team starts to write examination questions for two years' time.

Fr Dearman may have written the questions, but he does not get the final say about the quality of the answers. The awards meeting he chairs can only make recommendations about how the grades should be distributed. That crucial decision about who gets what grade is taken by the chief executive of the examining board in question, which in the case of James Esland's paper is Dr Ron McLone.

The QCA said it had no evidence of improper action by Dr McLone or his board, but the Government report commissioned from former chief inspector Mike Tomlinson is not expected until Friday.

Next year's candidates look on anxiously. Alexis Honner, 17, from the Cherwell School, Oxford, is taking maths, physics and chemistry with the OCR. And like his fellow students he needs reassurance. "It's undermined my confidence. We feel like guinea-pigs. People are playing around with my education until they can figure out how to do it right. That's depressing."