Marking 'Do as directed': where half marks belong and where they do not
A Std X teacher is marking five one-mark items of Do as directed and must decide how fine the marking may be, because the school's practice is to allow half marks for a partly correct transformation. The items and one candidate's answers: (1) Change the voice - 'The gardener had watered the plants before the sun rose.' Answer: 'The plants were watered by the gardener before the sun rose.' (2) Indirect speech - She said, 'I will finish the report today.' Answer: 'She said that she will finish the report today.' (3) Rewrite with 'No sooner … than' - 'As soon as the bell rang, the students rushed out.' Answer: 'No sooner the bell rang than the students rushed out.' (4) Make exclamatory - 'It is a very beautiful garden.' Answer: 'What a beautiful garden it is!' (5) Remove 'too' - 'The box is too heavy for me to lift.' Answer: 'The box is so heavy that I cannot lift it.' Items 4 and 5 are correct. The teacher must record a mark and a one-line reason for every deduction.
1. Mark items 1 and 2 and state a defensible policy on half marks, remembering that the school allows them.
Read the worked answer
Item 1 - ½ if you have declared that half marks exist, otherwise 0. The voice is correctly changed: object promoted to subject, agent in a by-phrase, past participle used. What is lost is the past perfect - 'were watered' is simple past, and the sentence's meaning ('the watering finished before sunrise') is slightly changed. Since the item tests voice and the voice is right, ½ is defensible under this school's policy. Mark it 0 only if you have announced that 'Do as directed' is all-or-nothing, and then apply that to every script.
Margin: 'Voice correct; tense lost - keep had been watered.'
Item 2 - 0, or ½ under the half-mark policy. Two changes are required in this item: will → would, and today → that day. The student has made neither. Two unmade changes are not a slip; they are a different sentence, and this is the item where a lenient marker should stop. Note that 'said' may remain 'said' because there is no listener to convert, so do not deduct for failing to write 'told'.
Margin: 'Two required changes missing: will → would, today → that day.'
Policy: decide before the first script, write the rule on the bundle, and apply it uniformly. A mark scheme loses credibility faster from a script marked one way on page 3 and another on page 30 than from any single generous award.
2. Item 3 is answered wrongly. Two corrected versions exist, and a third candidate wrote 'Hardly had the bell rung when the students rushed out.' Rule on all three.
Read the worked answer
The student's version - 0 (or ½ under the half-mark policy). Two things are wrong: inversion is missing ('No sooner the bell rang' should be 'No sooner had the bell rung' or 'No sooner did the bell ring'), and the correlative is incomplete - after 'No sooner' the clause needs 'had/did + subject', then 'than'. Because the tested structure itself is broken, this is weaker than item 1, where the structure was right and the tense wrong. Under a half-mark scheme, give ½; under all-or-nothing, 0.
Both corrections are acceptable:
- 'No sooner had the bell rung than the students rushed out.'
- 'No sooner did the bell ring than the students rushed out.'
Accept either; do not insist on the past perfect, since 'did … ring' is equally idiomatic and equally inverted.
'Hardly had the bell rung when…' - 0. The sentence is grammatical and has the same meaning, but it does not use 'No sooner … than'. Candidates sometimes memorise the two patterns as interchangeable; they are interchangeable in meaning and not in instruction. Award 0 and write it plainly in the margin, or the candidate will repeat the error.
Watch also for 'than' replaced by 'when' or 'then' - a one-word slip that breaks the correlative; deduct the whole mark under the strict rule, ½ under the other.
3. Two candidates give answers for items 4 and 5 that differ from this script: 'How beautiful the garden is!' and 'The box is so heavy that I cannot lift it.' Show how you would mark them and how you keep the whole script defensible.
Read the worked answer
Both are correct. 'How beautiful the garden is!' is a standard exclamatory form; the item asks for the exclamatory, not for a particular opening word, so do not reserve the mark for 'What a …!'. Likewise item 5's 'so … that … not' is exactly the expected transformation. Do not look for improvements nobody asked for - an exclamation mark, a change of pronoun, or a different adjective are not deductions.
Keeping the script defensible:
- Write the reason for every deduction in the margin using the same vocabulary each time ('voice correct, tense lost'; 'two changes missing'; 'structure not used'). Consistency is what a re-checker tests.
- Never mark a correct answer wrong because a neater alternative exists; the question asks for one correct transformation, not the best one.
- Where two answers are both grammatical, accept both and record it once at the top of the bundle so the next marker of the same set does the same.
- Remember that 'Do as directed' marks are for control of a named structure; spelling that does not obscure the structure is not a separate deduction here.
Final tally for this script: item 1 ½, item 2 0, item 3 0, item 4 1, item 5 1 - 2½ out of 5 under the declared policy, and the two failures that matter most are the missing inversion and the unrevised tense in indirect speech, which belong in the same remedial exercise.