The Three-Mark Inference Dispute
At a government inter-college in Sitapur, the Class 10 half-yearly English paper contains a 150-word unseen passage about a 300-year-old stepwell in a Rajasthan village that schoolchildren helped clean. Question 4 carries 3 marks: 'Why does the writer call the restoration "a quiet argument with forgetfulness"? Support your answer with evidence from the passage.' The district resource centre's marking scheme says: '1 mark for identifying the idea that restoration resists neglect; 2 marks for explanation with textual support.' Script A reads, 'Because they cleaned it.' Script B reads, 'By repairing the stepwell the children answer those who forgot it; the passage says the well was buried under silt and indifference for forty years, so cleaning it argues against forgetting, and it is quiet because nobody protested.' Script C reads, 'It is quiet because the village is silent.' The teacher must finalise forty scripts the same evening, and the school's general instruction says to accept any reasonable answer.
1. Award marks to Scripts A, B and C and justify each award against the scheme, stating how you use the school's 'any reasonable answer' instruction.
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Script A: 0/3. 'Because they cleaned it' retells the action; it does not identify the idea of restoration resisting neglect, so the 1 identification mark is not earned. No textual support follows, so the 2 explanation marks cannot be given. The 'reasonable answer' clause protects a different but defensible reading; it does not replace missing evidence.
Script B: 3/3. It states the claim (repair answers those who forgot), explains 'quiet' as 'nobody protested', and anchors both in the passage's 'silt and indifference for forty years'. Every component of the scheme is met. The extra interpretation is the explanation, not a deviation.
Script C: 0/3. It answers a different question - why the village is silent - and misreads 'quiet' as soundlessness rather than as unobtrusive action.
Moderation note: record 'claim + evidence link' as the deciding criterion so all examiners apply the same standard.
2. Two candidates paraphrase the evidence instead of quoting it. State the rule you will apply in moderation and illustrate it with Script B's evidence.
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Rule: accept paraphrase when it is specific enough for the examiner to locate the idea in the passage and when it is explicitly tied to the claim; reject vague paraphrase.
Application: 'The well was buried under silt and indifference for forty years' is specific - it names the neglect and its duration - so it earns the evidence marks even without quotation marks. By contrast, 'the passage says it was very old' would not earn them, because age alone does not establish forgetfulness and could be drawn from almost any sentence.
Moderation practice: write the accepted paraphrase on the scheme beside the key phrase so every examiner applies the same standard. This also avoids punishing candidates who copy accurately but omit quotation marks: the marks reward support, not punctuation.
3. Write three pieces of feedback for the class the next day that would improve inference answers without turning them into formula-writing.
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Claim, because, evidence. Every inference answer needs a position ('the writer means X'), a reason ('because Y'), and a location in the passage ('the line about Z'). Script A had none of the three; Script B had all three.
Unpack abstract nouns. When a question uses a phrase like 'argument with forgetfulness', ask what concrete actions or attitudes the phrase points to. 'Quiet' does not mean silent; it means unprotesting or unpublicised. Teach students to test the word against the passage's facts.
Retelling is not explaining. A plot summary earns little because it does not answer 'why'. Ask students to underline the exact words in the passage that made them choose their answer, then write one sentence connecting those words to the question. This preserves personal reading while keeping it evidence-based.