A day in the life of an ESL exam invigilator

It’s 5.45am and my morning alarm rings. Living in Scotland and this being November, I awake to a pitch-black sky and almost freezing temperatures. I groan, not quite silently, (unfortunately for my husband) and force myself out of bed. Today I am exam invigilator and my shift starts in just over an hour.

The monthly exam I invigilate is the Occupational English Test (OET); an English as a second language (ESL) exam for health professionals who wish to work in an English-speaking country. The OET, like other ESL exams and is divided into four assessments with the listening, reading and writing exam conducted in the morning and the speaking exam conducted in the afternoon.

I arrive 7am and login to the app; my shift has officially begun. We have just 18 candidates today (numbers each month range from between 15 to 40) and so our team consists of four invigilators. First job is to set up the exam environment. The venue is a language school and so to protect the integrity of the exam, we must cover any writing on posters and projects decorating the walls. Next, we put up the signs for the registration and the exam rooms as well as information on the bathroom breaks food and so on 

At 8am it’s time to let in the candidates. From this point everything goes at hyper-speed as we check in belongings, check IDs and give instructions. At 8.45 we escort candidates to the exam room, give more instructions (there’s a long script to read) before finally, just after 9am, the exam begins. Because of the brutality of such an early start and the fact that everything happens so fast at the beginning of the shift, before I know it four hours have passed and it’s 11am. Time for the tea break, which we do in shifts, while the exam continues.

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