True of the District, Absent from the Passage: Marking Inference in Unseen Comprehension
An unseen passage of about 190 words describes a weekly market on a river bank: the ferry that arrives at nine, the vegetable sellers who come over from the sandbar, and the narrator's uncle who sells bamboo baskets and never speaks while counting his money. Five questions follow, worth 1, 1, 2, 2 and 2. Question 3 asks: 'Why does the writer say the market begins before the ferry arrives?' The expected answer is that the sandbar sellers come early and lay out their goods. Script 8 answers: 'Because the road is flooded every year, so people come early to buy before the water rises' - true of the district, but not stated in the passage. Question 5 asks for the meaning of the word used for the uncle's habit of not speaking while he counts. Script 21 gives a synonym common in everyday speech that blurs the passage's contrast between the uncle's silence and the noise around him.
1. Mark Script 8 on Question 3 (2 marks) and justify how far outside knowledge may count.
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Award 0, or at most 1, of 2. The question asks what the writer says: the sandbar sellers arrive early and set out their goods before the ferry comes. The flooding explanation may be true of the district, but nothing in 190 words supports it, so the candidate has answered a different question.
Why not 2. Full marks would teach the class that plausible outside knowledge substitutes for reading, which is exactly what the unseen section exists to test.
Why consider 1. The answer does recognise that people gather before the ferry; if the script shows that much, one mark for partial understanding with the annotation 'not in the passage' is defensible. Decide once, before marking the batch, so every script with that answer gets the same score.
Follow-up. The remedy is the 'point to the line' habit: every inference answer must be traceable to a quoted phrase. Script 8, anonymised, is a good teaching example.
2. Mark Script 21's vocabulary item. Can a synonym that is correct in general speech earn the mark?
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No mark. A one-mark vocabulary item inside a comprehension passage tests the word as used here. The passage sets the uncle's silence against the noise around him; the everyday synonym blurs or reverses that contrast, so it fails the only relevant test. General plausibility is no defence - most wrong vocabulary answers in this section are words that are correct somewhere else.
Annotation. Write the passage phrase beside the answer, e.g. 'as used in line 14', so the candidate sees the rule rather than a bare cross.
Item design note. If the word is polysemous, quote the phrase in the question - 'the word X in "…" means' - which costs nothing and stops the item testing guesswork about which sense is meant. Check whether the same item is scheduled for the next paper; if so, amend it now.
3. Propose one change to Question 3 that improves discrimination without lengthening the paper.
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Rewrite Q3 as a locating item for the same 2 marks: 'Which detail in paragraph 2 explains why the market begins before the ferry arrives? (2)'. The candidate must find the detail (one mark) and state the link (one mark).
Why it discriminates better. Script 8's flooding answer cannot earn the first mark, because no such detail exists in paragraph 2; a candidate who has read the paragraph can point to the sellers unloading. The item now separates reading from prior knowledge instead of blending them.
Keep the rest intact. The two 2-mark inference items later in the set still test inference, so the section keeps its spread of skills while the opening item builds a fair ladder. Test the change against the current batch: if most scripts already cite paragraph 2, the original item was easier than assumed and the later items carry the real weight.