What this covers
- The report describes what candidates did, not what they should have done
- The common wrong answer is usually the mistake you are about to make
- Merge it onto the paper so you actually read it
- Ninety seconds per question, and it is the highest-yield reading available
Of the documents a board publishes for each paper, the examiner report is the one that reliably goes unopened. It is not glamorous. It has no questions in it and no answers, it is written in flat administrative prose, and it does not obviously belong to any revision technique.
It is also the only document that tells you what actually happened when thousands of people sat the paper you just attempted.
What is in one
A report walks through the paper question by question. For each, it says how well candidates did, what the strong answers contained, and - the valuable part - what the common wrong answers were and where the marks went.
That last category is written with a specificity you will not find anywhere else. Not 'candidates should show their working', but 'many candidates differentiated correctly and then failed to convert to metres, losing the final two marks'. That is a description of a mistake you are likely to make, written by someone who watched thousands of people make it.
What each document gives you
They answer different questions.
Mark scheme
- What the correct answer was
- Which marks were available for which step
- The acceptable alternatives
- Tells you whether you were right
Examiner report
- What most candidates actually wrote
- Where the marks were most often lost
- Which misreadings were common
- Tells you what you are likely to get wrong next time
The highest-yield sentence in revision
Almost every examiner report contains a sentence of the form 'a significant number of candidates did X'. X is a mistake that is easy to make, hard to notice, and now known to you before you make it. There is no other document that hands you that.
Why nobody reads them
Two reasons, both mechanical. The report is a separate download with a different filename, so reading it requires a deliberate act at a moment when you have just finished marking and want to stop. And it has no questions in it, so it does not feel like revision.
Both are solved the same way: put the report in the same file as the paper, at the end, so that finishing the paper leads into it.
Making yourself read it
Two minutes of setup per paper.
- Download the report with the paper
It is published alongside. Getting it later means not getting it.
- Merge paper, mark scheme and report
In that order, with bookmarks turned on, into one marking copy. The bookmarks let you jump between the three.
- Read the report immediately after marking
While the questions you got wrong are still in your head. A week later it is generic advice; now it is about you.
- Write down the ones that apply to you
Not all of them will. Two or three per paper will describe exactly what you just did, and those are the note.
Building the marking copy
Reading across several years
Examiner reports repeat themselves, and the repetition is the signal. A mistake mentioned in one year's report is a mistake; a mistake mentioned in five consecutive years is a structural feature of the subject that the teaching does not fix.
Extracting the reports to plain text and searching several of them at once surfaces those quickly. If the same phrase appears in four reports, that is a paragraph to take extremely seriously.
What to expect
- Typical length
- Ten to thirty pages for a full paper
- Structure
- General comments, then question by question
- Reading time
- Ninety seconds per question you care about
- Published
- Alongside the mark scheme, in the same archive
- Most useful section
- The common errors on the highest-mark questions
Getting value from a report
- Download it at the same time as the paper
- Merge it onto the end of the marking copy
- Read it straight after marking, not days later
- Read the questions you got wrong first, then the high-mark ones
- Write down only the errors that describe what you actually did
- Compare reports across years and take the repeated warnings seriously
Questions and answers
Where do I find the examiner report?
In the same past-paper archive as the question paper, usually with 'er' or 'examiner report' in the filename. It is published on the same schedule as the mark scheme.
Is the report different for each variant?
Yes, because the questions are different. Make sure the report matches the variant you sat, or its comments will describe questions you never saw.
Are examiner reports useful before I have sat the paper?
Less so. They describe answers to specific questions, so reading one cold is abstract. Their value comes from reading them immediately after attempting the paper they describe.
What if my board does not publish them?
Some do not, or restrict them to centres. In that case the mark scheme's own notes on acceptable and unacceptable answers are the nearest equivalent, and they are worth reading in full rather than only checking your answer against.
