Grading Two Readings of 'The Road Not Taken'
In a revision class on Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken', two students write one-paragraph answers to the question: 'What is the speaker's attitude towards the choice he has made?'
Priya writes: 'The speaker deeply regrets his choice. He says he will tell the story with a sigh, and sighs only come from sadness. He also says he took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference, which shows he is unhappy about losing the other road.'
Denzil writes: 'The speaker admits the two roads were worn about the same, so the choice was less dramatic than it looks. He expects that in future he will retell it with a sigh, and the sigh may be nostalgia rather than regret. The poem is about how we make ordinary choices look important afterwards.'
A third student asks whether she can write both readings and still get full marks. The teacher has to grade all three responses consistently.
1. Grade the two paragraphs and justify your grading with reference to the text.
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Denzil earns the higher mark; Priya earns partial credit for recognising the sigh but misreads its cause.
Priya's evidence breaks down twice. First, 'sighs only come from sadness' is an assumption, not a reading - a sigh can mark relief, weariness or wistfulness, and the poem places the sigh in a future act of storytelling ('I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence'), not at the moment of choice. Second, her use of 'And that has made all the difference' is unsupported: the line is deliberately ambiguous, and the poem gives no outcome to measure the difference against.
Denzil's reading is anchored in the text: 'the passing there / Had worn them really about the same' and 'both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black' establish that the roads were indistinguishable. He also notices the tense shift, which is what turns the poem from a report into a prediction about memory. The claim that the poem is about retrospective self-justification follows from that evidence rather than being imported into it.
2. How would you answer the third student - can both readings be written, and how?
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Yes, but not by listing them side by side and leaving the examiner to choose. A two-sided answer must commit to a reading while conceding the other's evidence, and it must show why the balance falls where it does.
Workable structure, three moves. (1) State the tension: the poem can be read as regret, but the regret is voiced from the future, not from the moment of choosing. (2) Give the two best pieces of evidence in order of strength, weakest first: the sigh (supports regret, but belongs to a later retelling), then 'worn them really about the same' (undercuts the importance of the choice). (3) Land: the poem is less about which road was taken than about how the speaker will narrate it.
What loses marks is hedging without decision - 'some say regret, others say not, both are correct'. Examiners reward a defensible claim supported by quoted words, not a survey of opinions.
3. The class has one week before the examination. What transferable rule should the teacher draw from this exercise?
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The rule: every interpretive claim in a literature answer must be tied to a word, phrase or line, and the tie must be visible. Priya's paragraph fails not because her feeling about the poem is unusual but because her links are assertions ('sighs only come from sadness') rather than quotations doing work.
Practical drill for the week: for each poem or prose piece on the syllabus, students write three sentences - a claim, a quotation of no more than eight words, and a sentence saying what the quotation proves. That structure is exactly what a 4-mark literature answer needs, and it exposes students who have memorised themes but cannot place them.
Second transferable point: notice tense and time in poetry. Denzil's advantage came from seeing that the sigh is future, not present. A student who habitually checks 'who is speaking, when, and to whom' will pick up marks in poetry answers across the paper without learning any new content.