Highlights from The Exam Man podcast- Season 2, episode 6
In this episode we are joined by Karen Williams and Jess Price, Exam Managers at King’s College London. They are both relatively new to the role and explain how they moved from running exams in schools to running exams in a university. We hear about the main differences between their previous and current experiences and the staggering scale of the university operation. They share with us the joys and challenges of their new roles and their energy and enthusiasm for exams shine through!
We'd really like to hear a little bit about your journey to running exams in universities, how you've ended up doing that. Karen, could we start with you?
K: I was working in exams in schools for about seven years. I enjoyed it, I liked the organisation of it and everything like that. But then the rules and everything changing all the time meant we were under pressure as Exam Officers. I was falling out of love with exams and wanted a change. And to be honest, I'd never even thought about going into higher education examinations. A post became available in King's College and I thought that sounds quite interesting. So I went for the post.
Exams are exams, but it is a completely different world to what school exams are like. There’s the capacity we hold in the examinations - we sit up to about 2,000 students in each of our sectors. Jess does the paper side, I do the digital side of the examinations. Some of our examinations faculties are run online. It's going similarly now to how I've heard AQA are thinking about running their exams digitally. So it is a completely different ball game in terms of the footfall you have and the prep that you've got to do to get ready, to get these exams logistically up and running. But no, it's fun. It's a different world.
So how long had you worked in schools before making that move then, Karen?
I'd been working in schools for about eight years, and then I'd been an Exam Officer for around about seven of those. The Exam Officer left and they just said, oh, could you do the role? And that was it, there was no kind of insight to what the role would be like, how demanding, it was sold as an admin role. That was completely not what an Exam Officer role is. This is a very, very common story. It's definitely, definitely not an admin role. The pressures that you're under to hit the deadlines and get everything running how it needs to be run and making sure that the students have got the best chance when sitting the exams. I think we saw a massive change when COVID hit and the different things we were going through. And when we came back into doing examinations after COVID, that was just another way of how we were running things again. So I worked within a trust and managed three schools in the end.
That's quite a good stepping stone, isn't it?
To be fair, I think if I hadn't have done the managing role within the school of running three different schools and how their setup was, coming to something as big as King's I would have been like a fish out of water. Walking into the Excel exam room it's another level.
And Jess, what about you? Did you start as a school's Exams Officer or have you come through the higher ed route?
J: I actually kind of fell into this post, similarly to Karen. I graduated university and my former head teacher said, Jess, do you have a job? Because I'd been invigilating at the school at the time and it just so happened that the receptionist had handed their notice in with immediate effect as I was leaving uni. She said to me, right, we'll do a six-month contract. You can then find what you want to be doing using your degree, etc. That was in 2011. So six months turned into doing 13 years at the school. I moved from reception into admissions and then moved into exams assistant and then took over as the exams and data manager about six years ago now. So I had quite a good understanding of exams before heading into it. I did a few extra bits on the side, like timetabling, and would do some pastoral roles within the school. I was a form tutor because I needed a new challenge every year.
I got to the point where I wasn't being challenged anymore in my job because I'd done it for so many years. I learned how to timetable in the last couple of years and supported the writing of the timetable. I got my skills from timetabling mock exams. So I had a good understanding of how processes need to come together to be able to form a decent looking timetable. We had a couple of new schools opened up in our trust, which started in 2017. So I supported the new Exams Officers in those posts. But I was at a point: where else am I going to go? Either I move into finance or HR, which I had no interest in, or I start looking at universities. Originally I applied for a timetabling job at Sussex and decided, no, that's too far away for me to commute. Then I narrowed it down to London Unis. And like Karen saw the job at King's come up and I thought, I’ll throw my hat in the ring and see what happens. I started there on the 1st of July, so I've done just under 3 months now.
So you're both new to university exams?
K: Yes, I started last September, and then Jess followed a few months after.
Has that been good, the fact that you're both new, picking it up together? Or do you think that it would have helped if one of you had had more experience? What do you think about that?
I think to be honest, we're a really good team. The hours are longer than you would do in school exams, and I thought school exams were long hours. We can do up to 12-hour days where we're working flat out. But I think as a team, we all pull together.
I was quite lucky that when I started, I was in a lower grade post and had the support of the team that was there at the time, training me and showing me different things. And I then got promoted about three or four months after starting. Then it was more learning the logistical side of it. You've got to put your head in the game that, although they are massive, these are still just exams that you're running. The processes are pretty similar to how you would run them in school exams. Me and Jess, we just pull on each other’s knowledge that we've got from school, knowledge that we both gained from being at King’s so far. Faculties and departments are amazing in helping you with any questions you've got as well, which can be plenty.
There are a couple of areas that I'm particularly interested in. One is to do with scale, the sheer size of it. And the other is to do with the systems and how they work. In schools, we have a nationwide framework for how everything works. So should we start with the scale? Firstly, how big is the examinations team?
K: We have eight of us in the team. We have the head of examinations, then there's me and Jess that each run the different sides of exams. So as I said, Jess does the paper side and I do the digital side. Then we've got four grade fives who are our senior assessment officers. They help prep and get all the admin side done. Then we've got a grade four who handles all our SharePoint and queries and things like that.
How many invigilators do you need?
We're just increasing our invigilation currently. I think we're at about 90 now, who are working regularly.
Is that a similar dynamic to schools in terms of recruiting invigilators and the sorts of people that you get? Or are there any differences?
J:Most of my invigilation team were either retired, but then post COVID in the schools, where money was starting to get more difficult for people, I had more people that were working multiple jobs. I saw the shift change with that over the last few years, but predominantly most of the team were people that were just looking for a few extra hours to pay for holidays and have some holiday spending money. Whereas from what I've seen from our team, and I've only run one exam season since I've joined King's, a lot of them seem to be into theatre, don't they, Karen? K: Yes, they really do. There's so many telling us all these theatre things that they're currently doing. But to be fair, their announcements are spot on! When you're having to talk to about 4,000 students at any one time, you've got to have some level of confidence.
Do you think that's because of where you are in London, that you get those?
K: It could be. We've got a whole array of people, that come and work with us. But we all get on so well. We met up with a couple of them yesterday for lunch and they're just good fun. And I think because you're working so long with each other, you just build relationships with your team anyway.
Do you have lead invigilators, Jess?
J: Yes, we're just looking at changing our structure. So within each of our paper and digital areas, we've got zones which are based on colour. We're going to have a head invigilator who will oversee the whole area of whether it's paper or digital. But then within each zone, we'll have a lead that will be taking charge of say 240 students, and then there'll be maybe two or three invigilators underneath them to help with the watching of the students and checking and getting everything laid out etc. It's just going out for advert actually, to try and get more of that structure in.
We do have some really tight turnarounds. We run three sessions a day - we have a nine o'clock, a one thirty and a four thirty. And most of our three hour exams will take place at nine o'clock in the morning. So we've then got a very short window to get everything packed up and ready before the students start coming in at one o'clock for the one thirty start. And sometimes we can be running up to forty different exams, within one session. So it's important to have that structure so that somebody is able to take a lead of each area. It's really important that we've got team members that understand what's going on in their zone, so that we then don't have any delays, or it has a knock on effect at any point in the day.
The reason I asked about lead invigilators, a few of my invigilators also invigilate up at the universities. We're in Brighton, so we have Sussex and Brighton Uni. They were saying to me that the structure that exists there for lead and non-lead invigilators is really all just about picking up papers. So basically, you get paid a little bit more if you're one of the people who goes and picks up the papers. But then what they said was that when they get in the exam room, there is no structure. And so everyone's just looking at each other to see who's going to take charge. And they said they much prefer it where they have that structure so that when they walk into the room they know that this person's in charge of this bit or whatever.
J: Absolutely. If there is a problem, there's a hierarchy for escalation of that problem. So if the lead can't solve it, they'll then go to the head and then the head will come to Karen or I, if there is a significant problem. The leads that we have got lined up for the post, have been working either with us for a number of years or have already been doing the job and we're just formalising it for them more than anything. It's all about thinking about your staff and staff well-being, isn't it? And it's making sure that we've got somebody who is going to enforce people taking their breaks, particularly when we're going between a 9 and a 1.30 slot. If we have been delayed for whatever reason, that then limits their break times and it's about coordinating that so that you keep the team happy. You don't want to be faced with staff turning around and saying, I've not had a break today, so I'm not coming in tomorrow, which I know does happen. I know that a lot of my colleagues when I was working in schools had real problems with retention of their invigilators year on year, particularly after COVID when the parameters of things changed. I think that's part of the reason why the JCQ changed the ratio, with the 40 to 1, because the schools just couldn't recruit invigilators.
Karen, how does invigilation work with the digital side of things then for you?
K: So it depends what type of exam we're doing. If we're doing the medical exams, they're structured on a different platform. So that we can see how they've logged in and whether they've gone away from where they're supposed to be. It works the same in terms of the invigilators. They're walking around making sure that they've not got phones and things. But if it's just a normal digital exam, then it is a case of spotting whether they're opening other websites that they're not supposed to be opening because they might get access to things that they're not supposed to get access to. We have to make sure that the Internet is strong enough to hold the capacity that we're doing within the examination room. You get a lot of invigilators that walk into digital and then they're scared because it's computers in front of them. I found that in schools, as soon as we said it was the listening exam, it was the one thing that freaked my invigilators out the most, and I was like, you just press “play”. It was that simple. You enter anything digital and people are just like, oh my god, no. So it's good to see a different side of the way an exam could work. I quite like the digital side.
What's the split, would you say, in terms of how many exams are conducted paper-based and how many are done digitally?
Currently more are done on the paper-based side than the digital side. We are getting more faculties that are getting a bit more interested in doing the digital side of exams. But again, it's what you can do within digital because you get a lot that need formulas or graphs drawn or different things like that. Right now, it's not something that we're able to offer on the digital side of things. So the majority are paper exams. When we spoke to AQA, that's basically what they were saying as well. They want to slowly move stuff towards digital, with the recognition that there'll be some things it may just never be appropriate for. There'll always probably be that split between paper and digital. But obviously, in some subjects, it sort of does make sense.
And I guess, are there any logistical differences between doing paper and online? Is one easier logistically? Who's got the easier job?!
K: In terms of setup, I would say paper has it easier. Logistically, we just have more that we need to get into the exam room, in terms of laptops, power, internet, you've got a whole array of things. You've got to think how that room can be set up to fit the students in. Whereas on the paper side, obviously, it's desks, seats and just the papers you put in front. But we don't just have one paper for the whole module, you could have different resit papers within that same module. So logistically, in terms of making sure that the papers are right and people are sitting the right exams and everything like that, I would say it's logistically harder in that element for the paper exams. Digitally, you're just going to the link that you've been provided for the exams. Yeah, I would say that side's a bit easier.
Jess, do you want to counter that?
J: No, I think Karen's right. I think we're fortunate that if we're short on papers, we have got access to printers. If a link doesn't work for Karen on a digital exam, then it's a much bigger challenge to try and resolve that. Obviously we put our measures in place to make sure that everything's checked before we go, and we go off to the printers to make sure we’re getting all the papers we’re expecting, prior to them getting delivered to Excel. Just to give you an idea of the numbers, the footfall that we have each year - in my last exam season in a school we did 6,500 papers in five and a half weeks. This year, King's is expecting to do between 120 and 140,000 exam sittings.
We have the same challenges that schools have in terms of making sure that we've got exams integrity when it comes to students that might have clashes, we've got problems with people trying to cheat, and that's never going to go away. It's just how we manage that in terms of the training of the invigilators and making sure that they are vigilant in what they are doing and holding them to account. Even though they are on a zero hours contract, they've still got a job to do. And so our training's key. So as much as it is different to schools, it is very similar in so many ways. And John, you mentioned earlier about the software that we use. We use a piece of software which is very similar to SIMS. In many ways, it's quite intuitive. When I joined the team I had a week before we were prepping for the August exams and the resits, and I looked at the system and I'm like, what is this system? But then as I started to work my way through it, I thought actually it is very similar to SIMS in many ways. It's just knowing the shortcuts and the key ways to get information processed through it. One of the things as well that we thought must differ quite a lot between schools and universities in terms of exams was access arrangements.
How are you doing that? Are you just taking what comes from students from when they've been at school? Or do students get assessed?
Students currently go and speak to a disability advisor who will set them up a King's Inclusion Plan to make university accessible. But then off the back of that, they put the PAA arrangements in for them as well. If they've got something from JCQ, we'll tend to give them an interim pass for six months, maybe two years in terms of waiting for a diagnostic report. They do have to get a diagnostic report done to show the SPLD side that they've got. And then it works similarly to what we do in schools in terms of what we put in place for that student. We just have a larger amount of students that we tend to go through. The support that they get from King's is good in terms of having an advisor they can go and talk to and work out how they can make their course, and also their examination accessible to them.
One of the things I think we see more and more of in schools is obviously students who are either struggling with mental health issues or have anxiety around doing exams. Is that something that you also are seeing quite a lot of at university level?
Yes. When a student walks into the Excel Centre and sees the size, that's unnerving in itself. I saw that in schools when a student used to walk into the exam hall, even that size. But we do get a lot of nervous students walking into the Excel Centre. We have exactly the same setup as schools. We have PAA rooms that students go to that are a bit more accessible. They can handle that anxiety a little bit more there than what they would in the main hall.
Do you get a lot of requests for those additional rooms then?
It depends. In terms of the anxiety side of things, they don't tend to get filled up as much. It's mainly if they've got extra time or a computer that needs to be used and things. We do have a few students that are anxious to come into the room. But I wouldn't say there was a vast majority, to be fair. J: We are at the tail end now of students that didn't actually sit their GCSEs and A levels during the pandemic. So those students are now leaving university. I think we've got a new challenge coming through with there being more ADHD diagnoses and autism as well. At the school there had been a 300% increase in students that had been diagnosed with either ADHD or autism pre and post-COVID in just my centre. So we've got that wave of challenge to come next at King's. I think we're at the tail end of the real mental health problems because of COVID but it's the new wave of challenge that is about to hit universities in the next couple of years. When I first started about 12 years ago a lot of the issues we faced were to do with behaviour in schools. Often quite confrontational behaviour, and that has almost gone. It's weird, isn't it, how you get these different types of challenge.
Do you get many students cheating? I should say committing malpractice, shouldn't I to use the correct terminology?!
J: I think if the opportunity is there, people will try and take it if they think they can get away with it. With the digital exams, that's added a new layer of complication with sites like ChatGPT that they're able to access. And it's the challenges of monitoring toilet breaks with them. You've got a room full of 4,000 students, who have got the opportunity to go to the toilet after an hour and 15 minutes of the exam starting. If a good percentage of those students all put their hand up and need to go, it's then how do we monitor that and stop them from having conversations when they step outside of the room, or trying to leave things in toilets, which I'm sure we've all had to deal with over the years. It's just trying to be one step ahead of them and trying to put into place preventative measures and making sure that they're well-informed, walking into the exam room, what the consequences are going to be should they try anything. The worst case that can happen is complete expulsion from university and they're all informed of that prior to the exam starting. It's just whether they think they're going to be able to get away with it and take the risk. We've got a good team of invigilators that are really hot on finding phones on them and on how things work in terms of repercussions. Whether it's on their person but not being used, right through to finding a student with their phone on their desk trying to look on their phone at an old paper. The sanction gets escalated depending on the severity and the nature of what the cheating or misconduct is that's taking place.
So do you produce materials that sort of mirror what JCQ would do? Do you have standard posters that you put up in exam rooms and information that you send to candidates about the rules?
K: We have signs basically saying stop - like you would put outside a room of an exam. Make sure you've not got your phone on, make sure it's switched off, blah, blah, blah. So we do have all of those signs, but they're just on a bigger scale. We have roller banners that we put up to make sure that students are aware of the rules. They're told within faculty, and then on any website pages that we've got, they're informed of rules and what they're allowed to do, not allowed to do and everything like that. But it's obviously not, unlike with JCQ, something that you get inspected on. Exams Officers are a really well-networked bunch of people.
How does that work across universities? Do you have like a network of exams managers that you know, and share best practice and resources, etc?
Because we are so new within the university roles, we haven't really reached out to other universities. We do have intercollegiate students where we'll have a student that is registered with another university, but sits a module with us. So we have the connection there.
I guess you're not under a national framework as in schools. Obviously you have a lot in common, but there's not maybe as much in common. Not in the same way that the schools are running exams anyway. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was the security of your exam papers. Do you just do that in exactly the same way as you would at school. Also getting the papers from the faculties, how does that all work?
It's all done securely through channels where they're locked down to just the faculties and ourselves, and that's how we share the papers. Because we get thousands of papers sent through to us. And then they're all printed off by a printing company that keep them in a secure lock-up area within Excel, which is where we store everything. And then that's brought out for the exam days.
How often do you go down to Excel then? How much time do you spend down there?
About 60% of our time - we're there a lot. We're back there in November for medical exams for a couple of days. Then we're there for a week in January. We're back again in March. We're back in there again for five weeks in May, and then back in there again for two weeks in August.
And August, is that re-sits? Is that when you're in your re-sits?
August is a re-sit period. We have a really tight turnaround. We finish exams at the end of May and then we have around about two months to turn around a two-week examination period for August. It’s full on. Jess literally started as we were beginning the prep for it. So she walked in and I was like, right, you're ready to hit the ground running, we're off. J: now's normally my downtime before I start thinking about exam results for the summer. And I was like, but no, I’ll have some time off in September when it's a little bit quieter.
Have you had that yet, Jess? It's getting to the end of September.
I did manage to get a week off, which was good.
If there was someone in a school right now who had listened to this conversation and was thinking, maybe I'd be interested in going into work in universities, what's the big thing, apart from maybe the scale, that's different from working in a school to working in a university? What’s the biggest challenge that you would have moving from one to the other?
K: I think it was learning the processes. I think I was so used to deadlines and the strict guidelines we worked to within a school. I think it was getting my head into a different way of working in terms of how the processes work, the meetings that we would be in. I’ve got more involved within the university, I feel, than within the school role. I think anyone that wants a different challenge in terms of working at scale within examinations, I would say, jump at it. You can tell, you both sound very energized by it. There's not a bit that I don't enjoy. When I walked into the January exams and even though the scale of it was just like, wow, it was just the buzz I still got from being within that exam room.
I'm just worried that we're going to cause a mass exodus from schools! Luckily, there aren't that many universities....! Jess, have you anything to add to what Karen said?
It’s great for better work-life balance, and trying to switch off and not having that commute every day, etc. But the hardest challenge, I think, is if you need an answer from somebody, when you're working in a school, you can just go and find that head of department to get those entries signed off before you're hitting double fees. It's not so easy to be able to have those levels of conversations. You can't necessarily always make direct contact and easy contact with people that you need to. But as part of the new exams team we've got meetings being scheduled with faculty, so that we can start not just having conversations through a screen, but start putting some names to faces properly and building those relationships up.
In terms of autonomy within schools, I know sometimes Exams Officers struggle with that, that particularly it's not seen as a particularly important job in some schools, which I think is fair to say, and which is then reflected in the salary. It's just deemed as a part-time job, which it isn't anymore. It is a full-time job when you're thinking about mocks and things. I think if anyone is looking for a new challenge, as Karen said, on a much bigger scale, exams are still exams and it definitely does provide that. I did have a lot of hesitation having worked somewhere for such a long time, and you're institutionalized in many ways. It was a big jump for me after 13 years, because actually am I making the right decision? But I've got absolutely zero regret about making this decision.
Do you know what, Jess? I've been working in exams and school for 13 years! Guys, thank you so much. It's been such an illuminating conversation. Thank you for having us. I think we might need to get you back on at some point. We’ve still got loads to ask……..
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