In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the key ideas that have underpinned colleagues’ thinking and experimentation with this approach and shows how the system that they have now adopted can be applied in a time-efficient manner while retaining its reliability and value for teachers.  She also outlines how this approach has been integrated within the wider requirements of a whole-school (and indeed multi-academy trust-wide) assessment framework, in a way which seeks to avoid distortion and to maximise the reliability of the judgements shared with students, leaders and parents...