Being thorough is not enough

A student of ours sat Edexcel IGCSE English Language earlier this year and asked us to look at her Language paper afterwards. She had done well. She wanted to know why one answer had not done better.

That answer is not a weak piece of writing. The question was worth twelve marks and asked how the writer uses language and structure. She wrote three long paragraphs. She quoted accurately and briefly. She named her techniques correctly — in media res, present tense, imperatives, sentence length. She noticed the shift at the very end of the extract, where long sentences drop into a one-word sentence.

She scored eight out of twelve.

Nothing had gone wrong. There is no error in that answer to point at, no missing paragraph, no misread of the text. The reason for the mark is not a mistake. The mark comes from a habit — in our experience, the habit that most often holds a strong student just below the top of the paper.

The word that describes it

When I read her script, the word that came to me was thorough. Not detailed — thorough. She covers a great deal. Her writing is clear and understandable, with some genuinely sophisticated vocabulary. There is a lot of it and it is all on task.

What I did not know when I chose that word is that Pearson had chosen it first.

Here is the top of the mark scheme for that question, in the board’s own words.^[1]

On this paper, thorough is a Level 4 word, and so is detailed. The two words a teacher or a parent reaches for when praising a strong answer both describe the band below the top one here. A student can be entirely thorough, entirely detailed, and be capped at ten out of twelve.

She was placed at the bottom of that band rather than the top. The board tells its examiners how that choice is made. Marks are awarded “towards the top or bottom of that level depending on how they have evidenced each of the descriptor bullet points.”^[1] Level 4 has two bullet points, and her answer answers one of them far better than the other.

What the top band asks for instead

Read the two levels next to each other and the difference is not size. Three words change, and each one asks for something a longer answer cannot supply.

Exploration becomes analysis. Exploring a text means going through it and finding what is there. Analysing it means taking one thing apart and showing how it works.

Detailed becomes discriminating. Discriminating means choosing carefully — which means choosing fewer. The top band is not asking for more quotations than the band below it. It is asking for better-chosen ones.

Support becomes clarify. At Level 4 a quotation supports the point: it proves you are not making it up. At Level 5 the quotation clarifies the point: after reading it, the reader understands something they did not understand before.

None of those three changes can be achieved by writing more. That is the whole difficulty. Every instinct a hard-working student has — cover more, quote more, say more — moves them along a line the mark scheme is not measuring.

Where her answer stopped

Here is one of her sentences.^[3] She is writing about the moment, early in the extract, when Aron Ralston kicks a wedged boulder to check whether it will take his weight. It is the rock that traps him a few seconds later.^[2]

“He reveals how he has even been in situations similar to this one as he describes how he ‘kick[s] at the boulder to test how stuck it is’, emphasising how he has been in such situations before.”

Everything in that sentence is true. The quotation is short and well chosen, and the reading of it is accurate.

But read what it finally says: he has been in this situation before. That is where it stops. The sentence returns to the observation it started from, and the reader is left holding a fact with nothing attached to it.

The question a marker is silently asking at that moment is: and therefore? If he has been in this situation before, what follows? That he has the skills to get himself out? That his experience is what lets him stay calm while he works? Either of those would have carried the point somewhere.

Here is a third possibility, and I think it is the strongest of the three, because the text hands it to us. The kick is not panic. It is a safety check. He is doing exactly what an experienced climber should do: testing the rock before trusting his weight to it. And the next sentence of the extract tells us the result — “It’s jammed tightly enough to hold my weight.”

The boulder passes the test. He does everything right, the check says the rock is safe, and the check is wrong.

The point reaches past Ralston. It asks what happens when care and experience are not enough — when a person does the correct thing, in the correct order, and is caught anyway. One extra sentence, and the observation has somewhere to go.

That sentence is what perceptive means. It is not a harder word for good, and it does not mean spotting something obscure. A perceptive point sees what the detail is doing — and the same quotation she chose, the same eight words about a kick, carries it. She had the evidence in her hand. What was missing was the sentence that says what it amounts to.

Her second example does the same thing. She writes that his use of technical climbing terms — “refrigerator, chockstone”, “stemming or chimneying” — “reveals the extent of his knowledge about rock-climbing; this is not just a hobby, he knows almost everything about it.”

Again it is correct. Again it stops. He knows a lot about climbing — and? The words themselves are the answer waiting to be picked up. Ralston calls one rock a “refrigerator chockstone” and another “a chockstone the size of a large bus tire”. He is measuring a canyon in kitchens and garages. That is how a person describes somewhere they find ordinary — and this is the place that is about to take his arm.

None of this is a quirk of one exam board. The words are arranged differently from board to board, which catches out students who have learned one set and then meet another.

On this Edexcel paper, detailed and perceptive sit a rung apart: detailed at Level 4, perceptive at Level 5. AQA arranges the same idea differently. Its English Language mark scheme runs on four levels, and the key words for the top one are “Perceptive, detailed” together, above “Clear, relevant”, “Some, attempts” and “Simple, limited”.^[4] AQA English Literature reaches the same place by a third route, asking at its top level for a “critical, exploratory, conceptualised response” supported by “judicious use of precise references”.^[5]

The words themselves mislead students who have read them, which we have written about separately in knowing the mark scheme is not understanding it.

Three documents, three vocabularies, one demand. Choose the evidence well, and make the point arrive at an idea. A student who learns to write the sentence after the observation is not learning an Edexcel trick or an AQA trick. Good writing is good writing, and every one of these documents is a different attempt to describe it.

She can already do this

The reason I am confident this is a habit rather than a limit is that she breaks it herself, once, in the last sentence of the same answer.

She has just noticed that the extract ends by dropping from long sentences into a single blunt one. Then she writes:

“This ending is extremely poignant and serves as a reminder that even the most experienced of people can fail in what they love and know so much about.”

That is a different kind of sentence entirely. It leaves the canyon. It stops describing Ralston and says what the extract is for — and what it says is true of people generally, not only of one climber with a trapped arm.

She wrote that. It is not beyond her; it is in the same answer as the two points that stopped short. She did it once, at the end, and everywhere else she stopped one sentence early.

That is a far more useful thing to tell a student than “go deeper”. You already know how to do this. Your own last sentence proves it. Now do it after every point, not only the final one.

Why a strong student develops this habit

There is a reason it happens, and it is not laziness. On this paper, the very next question rewards exactly the opposite instinct.

Question 5 asks students to compare two texts, and its mark scheme climbs on breadth in so many words:^[1]

Range. Wide range. Varied and comprehensive range. On Question 5, covering more genuinely does move the mark.

The word “range” does not appear anywhere in the Question 4 mark scheme.^[1] Nor do “wide”, “varied” or “comprehensive”, nor any other word for how much an answer covers. Neither does any other reference to quantity. The two questions are scored on opposite principles in the same document, and nobody tells the student.

So a capable student learns, correctly, that covering a lot is rewarded — and carries that habit into the one question where it is not. Her own marks sit either side of that line: fifteen out of twenty-two on the comparison question, eight out of twelve on this one. She was not worse at Question 4. She was using the right method on the wrong question.

What to practise

The fix is one sentence long, and it is the same sentence every time.

After writing any point about a writer’s method, ask one question of it: and what does that tell us? Not about the character — about people, or about what the writer wants the reader to feel or understand. Then write that down as the next sentence, before moving on.

Three things follow from doing it consistently.

The answer gets shorter, not longer. A student who finishes each point properly needs fewer of them, because a finished point does the work that two unfinished ones were sharing. Discriminating is the mark scheme’s word for that.

The quotations get better. Once a point has to arrive somewhere, a quotation that cannot carry it becomes obviously useless, and gets swapped for one that can.

The reading changes. If every point has to end in an idea, a student starts looking for ideas as they read, instead of hunting for techniques to name. The shift from exploring a text to analysing it happens there, and we have written about it before in why deeper inferences come from deeper knowledge.

None of this asks a student to work harder. Her answer was already long enough, already accurate, already well quoted. It asked for one more sentence after each point — the sentence she had already shown, at the bottom of the page, that she knew how to write.

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