A Mark per Point?

In June 2024, students sitting AQA’s GCSE English Literature Paper 2, Modern texts and poetry, turned to the section on An Inspector Calls and found this question waiting for them.

“How does Priestley use the character of Mrs Birling to explore ideas about social class?”

The question carried thirty marks, with four more for spelling, punctuation and grammar.^[1] Some students open a question like that with a plan already in their heads, taken from a popular piece of revision advice. You may have heard it too: every valid point earns one mark, so a student should write as many points as the question has marks. The advice is given most often for the English Language reading questions, but it is easy to see why a student would carry it into Literature as well.

If the advice is right, the best answer to a thirty-mark question is simply the one with the most points in it. If it is wrong, a student could fill two pages with points and still wonder why the grade did not move. Which of the two is true? The mark scheme answers that, and we come to it below. Underneath sits a bigger question: even if the list did earn the marks, what would it have taught?

This article uses AQA’s papers as its examples, because the question above comes from AQA. Five other exam boards also place longer Literature answers in levels. The section on examiners below shows where Edexcel, Eduqas, OCR, Edexcel International GCSE and Cambridge IGCSE say so.

Three correct points, no argument

Before we answer, look at a short passage that we wrote for this article, in the way a capable student might write it. It makes three separate points, using three phrases that Mrs Birling really says in Act Two.

Mrs Birling describes Eva’s use of the family name as “a piece of gross impertinence”. The adjective “gross” shows how offended she is that a working-class girl would dare to call herself a Birling. She also says “naturally”, which implies that she sees her prejudice as normal and never questions it. Finally, she admits that this “prejudiced me against her case”, which shows that she let her feelings about class decide whether Eva received help.

Count the points and you get three, each with a quotation and a “shows” or an “implies” after it. Every one of them is accurate, and a student who writes like this is doing a good deal right. Now ask a harder question about the passage as a whole. Where is it going? Each sentence makes its own point about Mrs Birling, and none of them builds on the one before, so you could shuffle them into any order without losing anything. The passage contains three correct comments, but it does not yet make an argument.

Where the advice is right

We agree with more of the advice than you might expect. In the paragraphs we teach, a point about meaning appears in almost every sentence. Teachers call this an inference, which means what the words suggest beyond what they say on the surface.

Our body paragraph has seven parts. It opens with a topic sentence that states the idea, followed by one sentence that joins the technique, the evidence and a first inference. Next come close analysis of one or two words, a first effect on the reader or audience, and a second, different effect. The author’s purpose follows, and then context, where the question asks for it. Every one of those seven parts carries an inference of its own. A student who writes our way therefore makes a great many points, and in that sense points really do win marks. The difference lies in what holds the points together.

The same phrases, now an argument

Here is a body paragraph from our model essay on Mrs Birling and class prejudice, quoted exactly.^[3] It uses the same three phrases as the passage above.

As chair of a charity committee, Mrs Birling once again exposes her view of duty: it is owed to the social order, so a poor girl daring to associate herself with the Birling name and its social standing offends her more than the girl’s poverty. Notably, her hyperbole, “a piece of gross impertinence”, turns Eva’s plea for help into a personal insult to the family. Eva’s real offence lay in the association: pregnant and alone, she had “called herself Mrs. Birling”, borrowing a name that represented a social position above any associations with the working class. The hyperbole, therefore, inflates Mrs Birling’s outrage while the sentence adverb “naturally”, in “naturally that … prejudiced me against her case”, converts her prejudice into upper-class common sense, eclipsing a desperate woman’s need with the social weight of the Birling name. Her calm admission to being “prejudiced against her case” may disturb an audience in its cold callousness. Spectators might also recognise how help can be refused to people in need because the applicant is judged not to know their place in society. Thus, Priestley perhaps intended to expose why help for people in need cannot depend on how one powerful person feels about the one asking: it must be guaranteed by law. Such judging of the poor before helping them was a legacy of the Poor Law of 1834, still in force in 1912, which made workhouses deliberately worse than the worst life outside so that only the desperate would apply.

Read it slowly and the seven parts appear in order. The first sentence states the idea, which is that Mrs Birling’s duty is owed to the social order, so Eva’s use of the family name offends her more than Eva’s poverty does. The hyperbole, or exaggeration, “gross impertinence” is the technique and the evidence, and the inference is that a plea for help has been turned into an insult. The close analysis stays with the borrowed name and with the single word “naturally”, which makes prejudice sound like common sense. Two effects follow, first the audience’s disturbance and then their recognition of how help can be refused. Priestley’s purpose comes next, that help must be guaranteed by law, and the Poor Law of 1834 supplies the context.

Every sentence in that paragraph contains an inference, so it makes at least as many points as the list did. What changes is that each inference answers a question raised by the sentence before it. Why does a borrowed name matter so much to Mrs Birling? Because it stood for a social position above the working class. What might her calm answer do to an audience? It may disturb them, and then show them how help can be refused. What did Priestley want them to conclude from that? That help should never depend on one person’s feelings. Take any sentence out of the paragraph and the argument has a gap in it.

Quality sets the level

The exam board’s own instructions settle the question. For longer answers like these, AQA’s mark schemes do not ask examiners to count points, but to place each answer in a level. For the longer English Language reading questions, the examiner is told to “Start at the lowest level of the mark scheme and use it as a ladder”, climbing until the answer and the description match.^[2] Then comes the sentence that matters most for this article.

“It is not the number of references, but the quality of the comments that will determine the level.”

The Literature mark scheme works in the same way. Examiners are told to “look at the overall quality of the answer”, and to use “a best fit approach” when an answer sits between two levels.^[1] At the top of AQA Literature’s highest level, the answer the board expects is described as “a critical, exploratory, well-structured argument”.^[1] So the board is asking for an argument with a structure. A list of separate points cannot give it that.

AQA is not the only board that marks by levels. We checked the Literature mark schemes of five other boards. Each one tells examiners to judge the quality of an answer and place it in a level.

• Edexcel GCSE English Literature: the marking grids “have been designed to assess student work holistically”. Examiners use “the ‘best fit’ approach” and decide “which descriptor most closely matches the answer”.^[10]
• Eduqas GCSE English Literature: examiners “select the band that most closely describes the quality of work being marked”.^[11] Under its list of points a student might make, the mark scheme adds: “This is not a checklist.”^[12]
• OCR GCSE English Literature: examiners decide which level “best describes the overall quality of the answer”.^[13] OCR tells examiners to “start at the highest level and work down”. AQA’s Language examiners start at the lowest level instead. Both methods end with the answer placed in one level.
• Edexcel International GCSE English Literature: examiners use “the ‘best fit’ approach” and decide “which descriptor most closely matches the answer”, in the same words as Edexcel’s GCSE.^[14]
• Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English: the level descriptors are “a guide to broad understanding of the qualities normally expected of, or typical of, work in a level”.^[15]

We have not checked CCEA’s mark schemes for this article.

So does adding more points work? It can, because AQA tells its Language examiners to “Always credit accurate, relevant and appropriate responses”,^[2] and its Literature examiners that they “must credit other valid points”.^[1] Edexcel’s Literature mark scheme gives the same instruction: “Reward all valid points”.^[10] A well-written list of relevant points has to be rewarded, and students taught this way do reach high grades, including 9s.

AQA’s Language mark scheme also shows where the limit lies. A student reaches a level by making “one or more comments of the quality demonstrated by the Indicative Standard”, which is the set of example comments the board prints for each level.^[2] Thirty comments of the kind that belong in a middle level are therefore still middle-level comments, however many of them there are. Once the level is set, the examiner has to “fine tune within the level”, and to “allow strong performance in some aspects to compensate” for weaker ones.^[2] More good comments can still lift a mark inside its level. Quality decides the level, while quantity can help to set the mark inside it. When we revise our own model essays, we add quotations and inferences as well as improving the ones already there, as long as each new one has a place in the argument.

The grade is not the whole aim

If a list of points can still earn marks, why not simply teach the list? A student who writes well enough could collect points all the way to a 7, and perhaps to an 8 or a 9. For us, though, the grade is not the whole aim.

We think the purpose of GCSE English is to help students communicate competently in many forms. After GCSE they move on to A level, then perhaps to university, and then to work, and at each stage they have to manage their writing on their own. A list of points may carry a student through one exam, but it does not teach them to build an argument. Every one of those later stages asks for an argument.

Some people would answer that the problem can be dealt with when it arrives. We think waiting only moves the work to a harder moment. At A level and at university the weakness of a list is exposed, and the student has to fix their writing while also learning a subject that is far more demanding than GCSE. A student who meets the aims of GCSE English at GCSE finds each later step easier, and can spend that time on the subject itself.

That is why we call our programme a mastery programme. The aim is a set of skills that last: building an argument and analysing evidence. Point-collecting chases the marks rather than the skill that the marks are meant to reward.

A structure can also be carried to a question the student has never seen, in a way that a set of rehearsed points cannot. This summer, one of our students met a question in his exam that he had never practised: it was not in a past paper, not in our practice papers and not in anything he had done at school. Without a model essay or a plan, he scored 100% on it. A student who has only collected points for the questions they revised has little to fall back on in that moment, while a student who knows how to build an argument can start building one.

At A level and university, the same fault

We cannot prove that listing points at GCSE causes problems later, but we can show what comes next. In their reports on recent exams, A level examiners in English Literature, History, Politics and Sociology wrote that weaker answers listed, described or retold, while stronger answers built an argument.^[4][5][6][7] One AQA Sociology report gave the result of undeveloped points a plain name: “a list like essay”.^[6]

University teachers report the same. In interviews for Ofqual, a history lecturer said that many first-year essays “are basically narratives”.^[8] A study at King’s College London found that most of the weaker first-year essays it examined “presented lists of facts from the literature, or stated their personal opinions” instead of taking a position.^[9] We think it is better to learn to build an argument at fifteen than at A level or university.

Four things to do this week

1. Label every sentence in one paragraph. Take a paragraph your child has written about a set text, and write beside each sentence the job it does: topic sentence, evidence, close analysis, effect, purpose or context. A sentence that has no job is a point being collected.

2. Ask “why does that matter?” after each inference. The next sentence in the paragraph should answer that question. If it starts a new topic instead, the paragraph has turned into a list.

3. Read the top level of the mark scheme together. Search for your child’s exam board and subject with the words “mark scheme”, find the highest level, and read its description out loud. On AQA English Literature, look for the words “well-structured argument”.^[1] The other boards use other words for their highest level. Look for “developed with maturity” on Edexcel GCSE,^[10] “sensitive and evaluative approach” on Eduqas,^[12] “Coherent critical style sustained” on OCR,^[13] “perceptive critical style” on Edexcel International GCSE^[14] and “individuality and insight” on Cambridge IGCSE.^[15]

4. Turn one list of points back into a paragraph. Choose the strongest quotation in the list and ask it three questions in order: what does this word suggest, how might it make the reader feel, and why did the writer want that? Three answers joined in that order are the start of an argument.

If you would like to know how your child’s own writing measures up, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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