Being thorough is not enough

One answer looked strong in every way, and it still lost four marks. 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 overall, but this answer puzzled her, and she wanted to know why it had not done better.

Here is what the answer contained. The question was worth twelve marks and asked how the writer uses language and structure. She wrote three long paragraphs, quoted accurately and briefly, and named her techniques correctly: in media res, present tense, imperatives, sentence length. She even 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.

Where did the other four marks go? There is no error in that answer to point at: no missing paragraph and no misreading of the text. The mark comes from a habit instead. In our experience, it is the habit that most often holds a strong student just below the top of the paper.

Thorough, and one level short

When I read her script, the word that came to me was thorough. I did not mean detailed, but thorough: she covers a great deal, her writing is clear and easy to follow, with some genuinely sophisticated vocabulary, and there is a lot of it, 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. A student can be entirely thorough and entirely detailed, and still be capped at ten out of twelve.

She was placed at the bottom of that band rather than the top. How does an examiner decide between the top and the bottom? The board gives its examiners a rule for it. 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.

The top band asks for better, not more

So what does the top band want that a longer answer cannot give? Put the two levels next to each other and the difference turns out to have nothing to do with size. Three words change, and each of the three asks for something that more writing cannot supply.

Exploration becomes analysis: exploring a text means going through it and finding what is there, while analysing it means taking one thing apart and showing how it works.

Detailed becomes discriminating: discriminating means choosing carefully, which in practice means choosing fewer. The top band asks for better-chosen quotations, rather than for more of them than the band below.

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

What does a hard-working student do when told to improve an answer? The sensible thing: cover more, quote more, say more. None of the three changes above can be achieved by writing more, so every one of those instincts moves the student along a line the mark scheme is not measuring.

Her points stopped one sentence early

Here is one of her sentences, exactly as she wrote it.^[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] Read it as a marker would, and before you go on, ask yourself what you would still want from it.

“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 to the text. The quotation is short and well chosen, and the reading of the quotation is accurate.

But look at where the sentence ends up: he has been in this situation before. It returns to the observation it started from, so 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 from that? Does it mean he has the skills to get himself out? Is his experience what lets him stay calm while he works? Either answer would have carried the point somewhere.

There is a third possibility, and I think it is the strongest of the three, because the text hands it to us. The kick is a safety check rather than a sign of panic. 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.

So the point reaches past Ralston, to 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 gives the observation somewhere to go.

Perceptive is the mark scheme’s word for that extra sentence. The word does not mean a harder way of saying good, nor spotting something obscure. A perceptive point sees what a detail is doing, and the quotation she chose, the same few words about a kick, carries that point perfectly well. She had the evidence in her hand. What was missing was the sentence that says what the evidence amounts to.

Her second example does the same thing. She writes that his use of technical climbing terms, “refrigerator, chockstone” and “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 the point is correct, and again the point stops. So he knows a lot about climbing, and therefore what? 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, yet this ordinary place is about to take his arm.

None of this is a quirk of one exam board. The words differ from board to board, so a student who has learned one set can be caught out by 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 in a different way. 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]

We have written separately about how mark-scheme words mislead the students who have read them, in knowing the mark scheme is not understanding it.

So three documents use three vocabularies to make 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 learning neither an Edexcel trick nor 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

How can I be confident that this is a habit rather than a limit? Because she breaks the habit 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, because 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 sentence herself, in the same answer as the two points that stopped short, so the skill is already within her reach. She used it once, at the end, and everywhere else she stopped one sentence early.

Telling a student that she can already do this is far more useful than telling her to “go deeper”. You already know how to do this, and your own last sentence proves it. Now do it after every point, not only the final one.

Question 5 rewards the opposite habit

Why would a capable student stop one sentence early, again and again? Laziness has nothing to do with it. 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, then wide range, then 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. The two questions are scored on opposite principles in the same document, yet nothing in that document warns the student that the rules have changed.

So a capable student learns, correctly, that covering a lot is rewarded, and then carries that habit into the one question where covering a lot is not rewarded. 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. Rather than being worse at Question 4, she was using the right method on the wrong question.

One question after every point

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

After writing any point about a writer’s method, ask one question of it: and what does that tell us? The answer should be about people, or about what the writer wants the reader to feel or understand, rather than about the character alone. Write that answer 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 the student swaps it 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 and already well quoted. What it needed was 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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