Punitive admin practices lead to lost income for OET assessors

Serena O’Meley, Division Industrial Officer, NTEU Victoria

A number of changes to the administration of the Occupational English Test (OET) has led to significant loss of income for assessors and increased work-related stress. Assessors are campaigning for a range of measures that will regularise their earnings and put an end to their employment being suspended for months at a time.

OET is a highly regarded English language test designed for health professionals who wish to register and practice in an Englishspeaking environment. It is owned and run by a joint venture between Cambridge English and Box Hill Institute. A pool of professionally trained assessors mark up to four components of the test: Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing.

Many assessors have a primary job at a university, TAFE or private higher education provider, and supplement their income with OET marking. For others, the marking is their only source of income, especially now that there have been large job losses across the higher education sector. They are contracted as ‘casual’ staff but many have worked for the company and its predecessors for decades. Three years ago, staff were redeployed to work from home and do so using their own computer equipment.

The shift to an online system has placed staff into competition with each other to get enough papers to mark. Papers frequently go live overnight which means that many staff miss out on work, especially if they have family responsibilities, health issues or can’t work through the night after a long day at another job. The vast majority of members would prefer a marking curfew at night andminimum allocations of papers to mark.

Working from home has led to a sense of isolation so the Union has become an important means for helping members to respond collectively to workplace change which, in turn, has led to significant membership growth in the ACE & Companies Branch.

Quality control or punishment?

OET places understandable emphasis upon quality control through a process of training followed by annual standardisation. A ‘selfaccess’ module to facilitate remediation is used for an assessor to re-standardise if they don’t meet test administration scoring standards.

Strangely, the process appears to measure the performance of assessors against each other, instead of against objective marking criteria. Over the past year many members have reported a substantial increase in the number of times they are being flagged as marking too ‘leniently’ or too ‘severely’ which they put down to system changes rather than changes in their performance.

Being flagged can have a devastating impact upon a staff member’s earning capacity. Not only do they need to wait for the self-access test materials to be made available to them online, but they have also been arbitrarily banned from the marking system for weeks at a time even though they have passed the self-access module.

If they do not pass or are found to be non-standard in two test administrations in succession, they are banned from marking until the next standardisation session takes place, which could be several months. Members see both processes as punitive, and by the time they are returned to the system any value from the retraining has been lost.

Out of 71 respondents to a survey undertaken by NTEU, just 6% were ‘unconcerned’ about the impact on their income from being banned, while 75% said that the loss of income was ‘very concerning’ or ‘catastrophic’. The median loss of income for assessors is between $5,000-$10,000 in a year, but for some it is tens of thousands of dollars more.

As one assessor has said:

‘I hope there will be a change in attitude towards assessors and that OET will realise they can’t function without us. We feel a strong lack of respect for our expertise. Is there another industry where workers are banned from working and punished by withholding the jobs?’

After much exchange of correspondence between NTEU and the company, management has quietly reduced the initial ban on marking to one test administration. At this stage, they are resisting calls to make the self-access test available on demand, and return staff to the marking pool immediately upon passing the test. Alternatively, they could follow the advice of the Association of Language Testers in Europe and make statistical corrections to severe or lenient marking.

It’s been extraordinary to see the lengths that company representatives have gone to avoid meeting with staff and their union. NTEU is seeking a meeting to discuss the results of its survey with a view to addressing a range of staff concerns in a productive and systematic manner, and in a spirit of co-operation. We trust that the company will listen to the concerns of their staff and take us up on this offer.