It's just gone 10:30 am on a hot summer morning in July. It's the second day of the test match and England are struggling to get back into the game after collapsing following a good start. We're in a hotel room in the middle of a city. There is no natural light and the air-conditioning is whirring unpleasantly. People keep trying to adjust it so the temperature varies from icy cold to tropical. We're sat round a small table. The rule for these meetings is that there are never quite enough chairs and never quite enough elbow room. The coffee is acrid and stewed.

We arrive in dribs and drabs, including the enthusiastic young head of department and the token woman. The token woman causes a stir. Everyone around the table goes into hormonal overdrive and the rather flat conversation about the journey in and the best way to travel from Derby and Leeds to central London gives way to some lively sexual repartee. One of us gets the token woman a cup of coffee and we sit down ready to start.

The servicing officer kicks off, welcoming us all to the meeting and telling us how important our role is in defining national standards. We all preen ourselves happily. The truth is that we have been doing this job for years and we have seen examinations come and go but, at least, we know the rules of the game and that is why we get asked back, again and again. The enthusiastic young head of department asks a question about how we are going to use the estimated grades. The rest of us just smile. We already know.

Next, it is the turn of the principal examiner to repeat what the servicing officer has just told us. Ordinarily, this would be boring but within the context of this meeting it is a way of delaying the proceedings and takes us a little closer to lunchtime. There have been a few snags with the marking. One examiner died in the traces and another appears to have had a nervous breakdown. Officials are trying to track down the scripts. The bad news is that many of the results are not on the computer but everyone is sure that there will be enough there to enable us to do the job.

And then the job starts. It goes like this. One of us principal examiners tells everyone about the papers he has marked and where he thinks the boundary mark is between the C and D Grade. The servicing officer then tells us where she thinks the boundary mark should go and places a big pile of scripts in the middle of the table. We sit round and read the answers through. Occasionally, we recite worthy snippets to one another, find the examiner comments amusing and chuckle at the failings of the candidates. We use sheets of paper or little sticky labels to show what scripts we have looked at and whether we thought they deserved the higher or the lower grade. It is quite easy to reach a consensus. Those of us boys who have been doing this for years pass selected scripts between us with the odd knowing comments, ‘So you can get a grade C now without being able to spell Napoleon!’

These little comments provide the important subtext of the meeting because they help us to form our consensus. The enthusiastic young head of department wavers between generosity and severity but the token woman is learning to trust our judgement. She has a charming way of passing the scripts and asking me for my advice which I find rather flattering.

After about ten minutes, we commence a process which is similar to the election of a new Pope. A flip chart is introduced with a badly drawn grid and, for the different scripts we have seen, we take turns to give them ticks, ticks in brackets or double ticks. We also give them crosses. Once we have all done this, we sit back and decide what we can see in the resulting ink blot. It is quickly clear that the mark we first thought of has got more ticks than any other mark below its band and, magically, we have found the right result. The servicing officer clears the table and we all have some more coffee.

That is the process. We need to get on with it because we have to do it eight more times and the token woman has to catch the 1548 from Euston or she will not be home until nine o'clock. Within no time at all it is lunchtime and, after a grisly hotel buffet, we speed up as the finishing line comes into sight. However there seems to be a little bit of a hold-up. The servicing officer and a statistician who has joined us for the afternoon are hunched over their laptops and one or other of them keeps popping out of the room to seek further advice. We don't like the look of this. It is not only token woman who has a train to catch.

When it looks as if the job has been done, the servicing officer introduces one of the bigwigs. It has turned out, after the computer has done its number crunching, that we have been far too generous. It looks as though there will be a ten percent increase in the number of candidates at grade C and above. The enthusiastic young head of department looks happy but us old hands know that order has to be restored.

We think back and realise that, yes, we did have reservations about some of the scripts and some of the marks and, if it is a matter of getting the early train, we are happy to reconsider. Do we need to look at more script evidence? No, we are certain now that the mark has to be changed. We do this to one or two borderlines and the servicing officer starts to smile and that taut stretched look on her face begins to soften. The bigwig starts talking about the cricket as we pack up to leave shuffling our expenses claims. Everyone is happy that it all adds up now. Everyone that is, apart from the odd couple of percent of candidates who worked their socks off and are going to be left wondering exactly what they did wrong come August.