A variety of measures of the weight of examination components are discussed in the measurement literature. Those which have been widely used are based upon considerations of candidate rank orders or the variance of the total scores. The appropriateness of such measures to examinations which are not norm‐referenced is questioned and a new measure based upon the notion of mark values is proposed which is appropriate to both norm‐ and criterion‐referenced examinations. The new measure has a number of other properties which make it generally preferable to traditional