The Three-Mark 'Why': Grading Inference in an Unseen Santhali Passage
The half-yearly paper for Class X Elective Santhali allots 12 of its 80 marks to unseen comprehension. This term's passage runs to about 150 words, describes a weekly village market, and must be read in 15 minutes. Question 3 reads: 'The mother turns the bangles over twice and puts them back on the cloth. What does this show about the family's situation? (3 marks).' Of 34 scripts, 21 answer only 'the mother did not buy the bangles', 9 add 'because they had no money', and 4 write: 'She wanted them. The price was more than the family could spare that week, so she put them back - and on the walk home her hand stayed on the cloth bag.' Question 5, worth 1 mark, asks for the meaning of the closing clause, glossed in class as 'the market emptied like a pond in May'. Six students wrote 'the market became a pond'; four left it blank.
1. Fix the allocation of the 3 marks in Question 3 and show exactly where each of the three groups of scripts gains or loses marks.
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Mark the inference, not the fact. A workable split: 1 mark for naming the condition or attitude in the candidate's own words (she wants the bangles but the family cannot spare the money - not indifference); 1 mark for pointing to the gesture that carries it (turning them over twice, the hand on the cloth bag); 1 mark for the link sentence that ties gesture to condition.
- The 21 'did not buy' scripts: at most 1 mark, and only for literal accuracy. 'She did not buy them' is already given in the question stem; it restates and infers nothing. Award 1 if you are crediting literal comprehension, and write that reason on the script so the mark is defensible.
- The 9 'because they had no money' scripts: 2 marks. The inference is correct but bare - 'no money' could be written by someone who never opened the passage. No textual evidence, no third mark.
- The 4 gesture scripts: 3 marks. They pick a detail, read it, and reach a claim the passage never states outright.
Apply one moderation test to all of them: could this answer have been written without reading the passage? If yes, cap it at 1.
2. Question 5 is worth one mark. Decide how to mark 'the market became a pond' and the four blanks, and say what each error tells you.
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Award 1 for 'the market became empty / silent / deserted, as a pond dries in May'; award 0 for 'the market became a pond'. The clause is a simile, and the mark is for the tenor, not the vehicle. A candidate who stops at the vehicle has decoded the words but not the comparison - the same failure as the 'did not buy' answers in Question 3, in a smaller space.
The four blanks are a different error: non-attempt rather than misreading. Score them 0, but do not treat them as evidence that the class cannot read; treat them as evidence that this clause was never unpacked in class, since a blank usually means 'I did not know where to start'.
Systematic confidence matters here. Six students wrote 'became a pond' without hesitation, so this is a teachable misconception, not carelessness. When you return the scripts, put both answers on the board and ask the class which one could actually happen in a market. That single question does more than any amount of re-explaining.
3. Design a five-minute re-teach using this same passage that moves the 21 literal answerers towards inference, and state how you will check transfer in the next test.
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Use a two-column grid on the board: 'What the text says' / 'What it shows'. Put 'she turned the bangles over twice' in the left column and leave the right column empty until the class fills it - 'she was deciding', 'she was calculating the price against the week's food', 'she wanted them'. The rule you are teaching: the left column is what the writer wrote; the right column is what the reader must supply, and the marks live on the right.
Then run the 'because' test aloud: every answer in the right column must survive 'because…' plus a quotation from the left column. Make the class hear that 'she did not buy them because she did not buy them' collapses.
Transfer check: in the next class test use a different passage and a different gesture (a father counting coins twice, a girl tying and untying a knot) with the same 3-mark structure. Success criterion: fewer than 8 of 34 scripts are pure restatement, down from 21. Keep the two passages side by side when you return the second test so students see that the skill, not the story, was being tested.