Four Hours, One Dictionary, and a Candidate Who Runs Out of Time
At a European School, a s7 candidate with a documented processing-speed difficulty has 25% extra time in the Latin mock: five hours instead of four. She may use a Latin dictionary. In the mock she spends three hours twenty minutes on the 40-mark translation and forty minutes on the four commentary questions (20 marks). She leaves two commentary questions blank. Her translation is accurate but literal: 34/40. Her two commentary answers are thin: 8/20. In class, she regularly finishes translation homework but rarely completes timed commentary work. The access-arrangements coordinator asks whether the extra time is the right support and whether the preliminary mark should use the mock score. The candidate says she looks up every word because 'the dictionary is allowed, so I should use it'. You have one month before the written exam.
1. Diagnose the candidate's problem. Is it primarily a need for more time, a dictionary-use strategy, or something else? Propose a two-week intervention with specific timings.
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The primary problem is strategy, amplified by anxiety about accuracy. Extra time is necessary but not sufficient: with five hours she still spent 80% of the paper on translation. Looking up every word is the symptom. The dictionary should be a targeted tool for uncertain vocabulary, not a reading method.
Intervention: Week 1, three 45-minute translation sessions. First 15 minutes: read the whole passage and mark unknown words without the dictionary. Next 20 minutes: draft the translation. Final 10 minutes: dictionary check only for marked words. Week 2, two full timed papers: 2 hours 30 minutes for translation, with a hard 15-minute dictionary budget, then 45 minutes for commentary. Use a timer and a visible clock. Commentary practice: four questions in 32 minutes, 8 minutes each, open-book at first, then closed-book. The aim is to protect 45 minutes for commentary and to reduce dictionary consultation to 8–10 words per passage.
2. What should the teacher recommend about the 25% extra time, and how should the mock score feed the preliminary mark?
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Keep the 25% extra time. Removing it would be unjustified and could disadvantage a candidate with a documented need. But extra time is not a teaching strategy; the intervention must sit alongside it.
The mock score is 42/60 (34 + 8). That should not be used directly as the preliminary mark because the mock captured an untrained dictionary habit, not the candidate's ceiling. Use it as one summative data point, note the access arrangement, and weight later timed work more heavily. The preliminary mark must reflect attainment against the syllabus, not the raw mock. Document the intervention, the 42/60, and the improved timed pieces. If the later timed work rises to 50/60, the preliminary mark should reflect that trajectory without pretending the mock did not happen.