Two Answer Keys for One Inference Item
A district moderation meeting for the Class 10 Telugu L2 pre-board paper. The unseen prose passage (150 words) has a narrator recalling his grandmother, who fed crows at dawn, and contains the line 'I was afraid of her silence more than of the dark granary'. The overall tone of the passage is warm and nostalgic, and the last paragraph describes her laughing at his childish fears.
Item 3 (2 marks): 'The narrator's feeling for his grandmother is best described as (a) fearful respect, (b) resentment, (c) indifference, (d) playful affection. Justify in one sentence.' One mark for the option, one for the justification.
Key version one says (a). Key version two, circulated later by another teacher, says (d). Across the district, 12 students chose (d), citing 'playful affection', and 9 chose (a), citing the word 'afraid'. Results must be published tomorrow.
1. Which option is textually supported, and what should the moderation meeting do with the key?
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Keep (a) as the key; do not change it to (d).
The stem says best described, so we look for the feeling the passage actually states and supports. The explicit evidence is 'I was afraid of her silence', and fear plus a revered elder is exactly fearful respect. Option (d) borrows from the passage's general warm tone and from the last paragraph's laughter - but the laughter is directed at his fears, which reinforces awe rather than cancels it. Resentment (b) and indifference (c) have no support at all.
What the meeting should do:
- Confirm (a) and minuted reasons for the decision.
- Note that (d) is a well-designed distractor that rewards tone-spotting over close reading, and record it as a high-distractor item for future papers.
- Resist the temptation to accept both answers. Accepting a textually unsupported option to settle a dispute teaches students that the passage does not have to be read.
2. Nine students chose (a) but justified it with 'because grandmothers are respected in our culture'. How do you mark the justification mark?
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0 for the justification, even though the option is right: total 1/2.
The option mark rewards choosing correctly; the justification mark exists to test whether the choice came from the passage. 'Grandmothers are respected in our culture' is a general belief that would fit any passage about any grandmother - it does not cite the silence, the granary or the fear. Awarding it would make the second mark a copy of the first.
Model justification for full marks: 'The narrator says he feared her silence more than the dark granary, which shows awe rather than mere fondness.'
This is a frequent pattern in comprehension marking and should be stated in the scheme: a justification earns its mark only if it points to words or an incident in the passage and those words support the option chosen. A correct option with a generic reason is 1/2; a wrong option with a passage-based reason is also 1/2, because the reading skill is visible even when the conclusion is not.
3. Write the instruction you would add to the paper-setting checklist so items like this do not split two keys next year.
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A three-line checklist entry, aimed at the cause rather than the symptom.
The cause here is not a hard passage; it is a stem that allows tone to compete with stated feeling, plus a key that was never tested against the passage line by line. Add:
- Every inference item must be answerable from one identifiable sentence or incident; the setter must copy that sentence into the key. An option that can only be defended from 'general tone' should be rewritten or dropped.
- Each distractor must be wrong for a statable reason, written under the key ('(d) fails because fear, not playfulness, is what the narrator names').
- Two markers must answer the item independently before the paper is printed; disagreement at that stage is cheap to fix, disagreement after the exam is not.
Add one line for the moderation file as well: when two keys exist, the later one does not automatically supersede the first - the passage decides, and the decision and its reasons go into the minutes for the next setter to read.