There are many CPD options available to teachers these days, from weekly online courses to one-day training events.

However, one of the most impactful development options I have undertaken is one that is not always listed as such: being an exam marker.

I have been an examiner for three years and found it hugely rewarding in several ways.

1. Clear insight into the specification

As an examiner, you develop an insider’s view of the qualifications you teach.

The training and standardisation process demands that you interrogate the specification and mark scheme with a precision that classroom teaching alone rarely requires.

For example, you learn how to mark using level-based criteria, what the difference is between a top level 3 response and a bottom level 4 and what the bullet points in the rubric actually mean in practice.

This helps you understand why one descriptor signals superficial knowledge while another rewards sustained argument, and what constitutes a “legitimate response” even when it is not listed in the indicative content.

2. Improved teaching and feedback

Linked to the above, this helps you give better feedback in class to students. When you have spent weeks marking against an official national standard, you stop defaulting to vague praise and start diagnosing precisely where a student sits within a level.

You recognise partial understanding, spot the exact moment an argument loses coherence and know what “just edges into this level” looks like.

This knowledge makes your feedback tangible. Instead of “good point, but develop further”, you can say: “You’ve identified a relevant factor here and now need to weigh its significance against the others to push into level 4.”

As examiner and history teacher Joshua Bolton puts it: “The most useful thing has been visualising what top-level skills actually look like. We always tell students to ‘analyse more’, but it is hard to understand what that means until you see it across hundreds of responses.”

Having seen more scripts, your comments become rooted in the actual criteria by which final work will be judged.

3. Seeing more answers

Following on from this, because you read hundreds of responses from students you have never taught, you see approaches to questions you may not have considered, using structures that differ from the essay frameworks you drill in your own classroom.

For essay-based subjects especially, this exposure is gold. You begin to appreciate that there is rarely a single “correct” way to construct an argument, only different paths to the same top-level thinking.

It helps you to see quality in many forms that can then directly influence your planning and feedback - helping you stop teaching “to the test” and start teaching with alignment to the framework.

4. Exposing misconceptions

We all enter the classroom with assumptions about what examiners want. Some we inherited from our own teachers; others we developed through trial and error.

Examining ruthlessly exposes which of those assumptions are wrong and often reveals that the strictest rules we enforce are the ones exam boards never wrote.

Politics textbook author David Tuck recalls marking for GCSE back when sources were bigger: “The team lead spent time explaining how the best answers never used the word ‘bias’ - they simply explained it. Students had been taught not to use the word at all. That stopped me in my tracks.”

This is the moment a long-held belief unravels. You discover that the “banned words” list you swore by was never official policy. You learn that “typicality” in source analysis is not a throwaway tick box but a genuine analytical tool.

These revelations cut through years of received wisdom and force you to rethink not just what you teach, but whether the habits you pass on to students are helping or hindering them.

5. Cross-departmental insight that shapes curriculum

Another huge value of examining emerges when you bring examiner insights to your school: the misconceptions, where students often drop marks, which questions discriminate effectively and how thinking is developing for future assessments.

This can help lead to conversations about whether the curriculum genuinely prepares students for what the exam demands, if there are gaps in the teaching they are receiving and the mark scheme before official data confirms them.

This allows you to share alternative approaches and structures that you have seen succeed in other schools, broadening your department’s collective sense of what good looks like.

Different exam boards offer different training; some are more sophisticated than others. But even the simpler ones, I found, were still absolutely worth doing. The insights you gain depend less on the platform and more on the focused attention you give to the process itself.

Sheriza Wadhwani Samtani is a history teacher and head of EPQ at Harrow International School Hong Kong