The Conditional Revival: Marking Inference and Synonym Items on an Unseen Passage
A 10-mark unseen-passage block in a mid-term paper uses a 210-word passage on the restoration of a town lake in north Karnataka. The passage states that over eleven months 1,400 volunteers removed 14 tonnes of silt, dissolved oxygen rose from 2.1 to 5.4 mg/L, and fish species counted in the annual survey went from six to eleven. It then notes that two storm drains still carry untreated sewage into the lake and that the improvement is 'conditional'. Question 3 asks, for two marks, why the writer calls the revival conditional. Question 4 asks students to pick from paragraph 3 a word meaning 'kept up over time'; the paragraph uses 'sustained'. A student writes for Q3: 'Because the lake is still dirty.' For Q4 the student writes 'persistent'. The student scored 12 of 14 on the objective items, expects full marks here too, and argues that 'persistent' means the same thing, so it should count.
1. Award marks for both answers and justify the split. What exactly turns the Q3 answer from one mark into two?
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Q3: 1/2. The answer names a condition ('still dirty') but not the condition the passage actually states - the two storm drains discharging untreated sewage. One mark is for recognising that the improvement is provisional; the second mark is for the specific textual cause and its consequence: 'because two storm drains still carry untreated sewage into the lake, so the gain depends on stopping that inflow and could be reversed.' Vague moralising is capped at 1.
Q4: 0/1, for two independent reasons. (a) The instruction says from paragraph 3; 'persistent' does not occur there. (b) Even as a synonym, 'persistent' describes something that continues stubbornly, whereas 'sustained' in the passage describes a rise kept up by continuing effort. A near-synonym is judged against the sentence slot, not against a dictionary.
2. The student says: 'I got 12/14, so these answers were basically fine.' Explain the marking principle you would use to answer this.
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Marks attach to questions, not to totals. A score of 12/14 reports that the objective items were secure and that a different skill - locating and citing evidence - was not. If the teacher awards 2/2 because the candidate is generally strong, the mark sheet stops saying which skill failed, and the student never rewrites the answer. The correct move is to show the two sentences that would have earned the second mark, and to point out that the same habit (asserting instead of citing) will cost marks in the poetry and prose answers, where evidence is worth more. High totals should produce the feedback 'your reading is fine; your evidence is thin', never a concession.
3. Write the margin comment you would put beside Q3, in 20 words or fewer, so that it teaches rather than scolds.
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'You named the problem; now name the cause - where does the sewage come from, and what could reverse the gain?' (20 words.)
Why this shape: it opens by crediting what the answer did (naming a problem), so the student keeps reading; it converts the missing mark into a question the student can answer from the passage rather than a verdict; and it points at the consequence - reversibility - which is the exact idea the second mark was for.