In a series of papers, the case has been argued for viewing the process of aggregating marks in an examination from a decision theoretic (or measurement theoretic) standpoint. The purpose of aggregating marks is to form an overall ranking of the candidates that corresponds with the ranking that the examiners would generate by holistic judgement, if they had the time and the powers of consistency required. Models of aggregation that parallel multi‐attribute value functions have been proposed. These models have not, until recently, been trialed with practising examiners, however. The problem has been that the interactive procedure, which the assessment of the models requires, needed to be implemented within a general examination processing package so that the context in which the models are used could be as realistic as possible. This has now been achieved for the restricted case of aggregating two components, and preliminary trials with examiners have begun.The implementation adopted was not thelock‐stepprocedure originally suggested, but rather a least‐squares fitting procedure of finite‐difference approximations to the aggregation functions. Although a least squares procedure is used, the assessment is iterative and allows the users to revise their judgements in the light of possible inconsistencies. The authors believe this approach has not been used before, either in the examination context or in the assessment of multi‐attribute utility