There is a particular kind of student who worries me more than a struggling one.
They are doing well. Their books are full. They hand in everything. Their answers are, in the teacher’s word, fine. They sit at a 6 or a 7 and they cannot work out why they are not at an 8 or a 9.
Almost always, the answer is the same. Nothing they write is wrong. Everything they write is nearly right.
And “nearly right” turns out to be the most expensive habit in the subject.
First, two facts to set the scene
You may know these already from our earlier article, so briefly.
A grade 9 in English Language went to 2.9% of 16-year-olds in England last summer, fewer than three students in a hundred.[1] Calling it “a very good grade” undersells it. This is the top slice of the top fifth.
And English is genuinely hard to mark. When Ofqual measured how often examiners give the same mark a senior examiner would give, maths scored 0.96. An English language and literature qualification scored 0.52.[2]
Now hold those two facts together, because the interesting part is what happens when they meet.
The detail in the Ofqual report that should change how you revise
Buried in that marking study is a sentence that matters more than the headline number.
Ofqual found the probability of getting the definitive mark “dips in the mark region near the grade boundaries and is highest at the extremes of the mark distribution.“[2]
Read that again slowly, because it is doing a lot of work.
An answer that sits on a borderline is the answer most likely to be marked inconsistently. An answer that is clearly strong is the answer most likely to be marked correctly.
No examiner is being careless here. The reason is obvious once you say it plainly. If a piece of writing is clearly excellent, any competent examiner recognises it. If it hovers between two levels, the examiner has to make a fine judgement, under time pressure, on a hot afternoon, deep into a pile of scripts that has to be finished by a deadline.
So “nearly right” costs your child twice.
First, it caps the grade. Nearly-right answers earn middle-band marks by definition.
Second — and this is the part nobody tells you — it makes the grade they do get less certain. A borderline script is precisely the script the marking system handles least reliably.
Being clearly strong is not just worth more marks. It removes the doubt.
What “nearly right” actually looks like
It is rarely dramatic. That is why it survives so long.
– The quotation supports the point, roughly. It is not the best quotation for it. – The technique is named correctly — “this is a metaphor” — but the explanation of its effect could be attached to almost any metaphor in any text. – The point about the writer’s intention is true, and also true of half the novels ever written. – The sentence is grammatically fine, and three words longer than it needs to be. – The conclusion restates the introduction rather than arriving anywhere.
Every one of those earns something. Not one of them earns the top band.
And here is why it persists: nothing in the student’s experience flags it as a problem. They are not making errors. They get reasonable marks. Teachers write “good” in the margin, because it is good. There is no moment of failure to learn from.
The student is stuck at a plateau built entirely out of acceptable work.
The distinction that fixes it
Doug Lemov, who has spent years studying what effective teachers do differently, has a technique he calls “Right is Right”. The instruction is blunt: “Do not accept partially or almost right answers; hold out for all the way.”[3]
Not because half-right answers are bad. Because accepting them teaches a student that half-right is the finish line.
Now, an important balance, and I want to be accurate about this because it is easy to turn into something harmful.
Lemov does not argue that a student should get everything right all the time. In Practice Perfect he says the opposite: “the ideal success rate still isn’t 100 percent — if that’s the case, then the activity isn’t hard enough.”[4]
Those two ideas fit together, and together they are the whole method:
> Practice should be hard enough that your child fails sometimes. Marking should never round up.
A student who never gets anything wrong in practice is practising things they can already do. A student whose almost-right answers are quietly accepted never finds out where the bar actually is.
Most students get neither. Their work is too easy and it is marked generously.
Why this is worse in English than anywhere else
In maths, “nearly right” is usually just wrong. The number does not balance. The feedback is instant and unarguable.
In English there is no such signal. A vague paragraph looks like a paragraph. It fills the same space on the page as a precise one. From the outside — including from the student’s own side of the desk — they are almost indistinguishable.
The exam boards see the consequence. On one 8-mark analysis question in June 2023, AQA reported that “just 3% of students were awarded marks in the highest level.”[5] Those students had not left the question blank. They had written something reasonable. Reasonable was not what the top band asked for.
What actually moves a student off the plateau
Three things, and none of them is “work harder”.
1. Marking that refuses to round up. If a paragraph is nearly there, it should be told so, and told exactly what is missing. We mark more strictly than the exam board does, on purpose: a student who is comfortably strong against a hard standard is safe against the real one.
2. Feedback attached to the sentence, not the essay. Not “develop your analysis”. Instead: this explanation would fit any metaphor in the book; tell me what THIS one does that another would not. That is a correction a student can act on immediately.
3. Doing it again. A correction that is read and not applied changes nothing. The paragraph gets rewritten until it is right, and then the next weakness gets found.
This is slower than writing another essay. It is also the only thing that reliably works, and it is exactly what we built Sophicly to do: every piece marked against the examiner’s criteria, element by element, with the correction attached and the rewrite expected.
One question to ask tonight
If you want a single, quick test of whether your child has this habit, ask them about a piece of work they were pleased with:
> “Is this the best answer — or just the quickest one you could think of?”
Students almost always know. The habit survives because nobody asks.
If you would like to see where your child stands against the exam criteria right now, our assessment takes about two minutes and gives you a predicted grade plus the specific skills holding them back.
