Copying Is Not Inferring: Marking the Two-Mark 'Why' Question in an Unseen Passage
In the unseen passage section of a mock test, 45 students read a 180-word Telugu passage about a village librarian who kept a small library open every evening for children. Question 3 carries two marks and asks, 'Why does the writer call the librarian the real lamp of the village?' The expected answer is inferential: the lamp is a metaphor for the light of knowledge he kept burning. Twenty-six students copied the sentence 'Every evening he lit the lamp on the table' and were given zero by Examiner A and one mark by Examiner B, who says the copied sentence is 'from the passage and relevant'. Question 4 asked for a word from the passage meaning 'prosperity'; eleven students wrote a paraphrase instead of the word, and three wrote a correct word that appears in a different paragraph. The coordinator must decide the marking rule for lift-and-quote answers, distinguish retrieval from inference in the key, and tell the students what an inference answer must contain before the next mock.
1. Decide how a copied sentence is to be marked against a two-mark 'why' question, and rule on the 26 scripts.
Read the worked answer
The question word is why, so the mark is for the causal link, not for the quotation.
- 0 marks: a bare copy of 'Every evening he lit the lamp on the table'. It answers what he did, and it is available to a student who has understood nothing. Awarding 1 for it, as Examiner B does, rewards location-finding and turns an inference item into a copying item - which is what happened across 26 scripts.
- 1 mark: the copy plus a clause of the student's own - 'because the lamp stands for the knowledge he gave the children'.
- 2 marks: a self-explained answer naming the metaphor and its tenor - 'the lamp is a metaphor for the light of knowledge; he kept it burning in the village every evening'.
Examiner A's zero is right in principle, but record it as zero with feedback ('you found the right sentence; now say what the lamp stands for'), otherwise the class learns only that copying fails, not what to do instead. Board the 1-mark and 2-mark models before the papers go back.
2. Rule on Question 4: the eleven paraphrase answers and the three whose correct word sits in a different paragraph.
Read the worked answer
Paraphrase answers: 0. The instruction was to find the word in the passage. A paraphrase proves the student knows the meaning, which is a different skill; crediting it makes the item untestable and unfair to the students who did the searching.
Out-of-paragraph word: check the sense, not the location. If the item did not restrict the paragraph, a correct synonym found elsewhere is a correct answer - provided it carries the same sense in context (the prosperity of a family is not the prosperity of the harvest). Award the mark where the sense matches; withhold it where the student has matched a dictionary but not the passage.
Prevention: next time write 'find the word in paragraph 2 that means…', and add one item requiring the word to be used in a new sentence, so recognition and production are separated and both are visible in the script.
Also rewrite Q3's stem so the inference is unmistakable: 'Explain what the writer means by calling the librarian the real lamp of the village.' That wording cannot be answered by copying.