NSW Board of Studies forced to fork out for system outage

The NSW Board of Studies has agreed to compensate 2014 HSC markers for time spent struggling with the state’s online marking system which suffered performance issues between October and November this year.

The NSW Teachers Federation has negotiated a deal with the Board which will see external online markers - assigned to 14 specific course papers - paid for an extra hour's work on top of all marking sessions they completed on seven nominated days in October and November. 

Markers complained to the teacher’s union about issues downloading papers and connecting to the online marking system. The glitches meant markers spent additional time critiquing a set number of units, for which they are only paid per-script.

The Board of Studies originally only agreed to compensate the markers for time lost on 1 November, but later acquiesced to additional days after deciding markers should not be “unfairly disadvantaged for the time lost”.

The Board of Studies assured the Teachers Federation that all system issues were remedied by 7 November.

The Marker Online system electronically distributes scanned papers to external markers via a secure online portal. The Board began trialling onscreen marking of HSC papers in 2009, and has gradually ramped up the proportion of student work marked this way year-on-year since.