She revised it. She can explain it to you over dinner, properly, without notes. Then the paper comes back with two out of six on the long answer and she can’t tell you what went wrong, because as far as she’s concerned she wrote down everything she knew. That’s usually the week a parent starts looking for an A Level Biology tutor.
She did write everything she knew. But that was the mistake.
What is this article about?
You’re going to mark a six-marker yourself. You don’t need any biology. By the end you’ll see where the grade actually goes.
You’re going to mark this one yourself
I’m not going to explain the six-marker problem to you. I’m going to let you find it, because once you’ve seen it you can’t stop seeing it, and you’ll spot it in your own child’s work by the weekend. You need no biology at all for this. Only the mark scheme, which is the point.
The question is worth six. “Evaluate the use of stem cells in treating disease.”
Here’s Mariam’s answer. It got two.
“Stem cells are unspecialised cells that can divide and differentiate into other cell types. They are found in embryos and in adult bone marrow. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can become any cell type in the body, while adult stem cells are multipotent. Scientists can grow them in culture. They have been used to treat leukaemia through bone marrow transplants, and research is being done into using them for Parkinson’s disease, spinal injuries and type 1 diabetes.”
Mariam is a made-up name, and the answer blends real ones we’ve marked, but the scores are exactly what happens. Read it again. Everything in it is true. Nothing in it is sloppy. It’s better written than most of what a Year 13 produces, and her teacher would have been pleased to hear her say it out loud in class.
Now look at the command word in the question. It says evaluate.
What the mark scheme was actually paying for
Evaluate means weigh one side against the other and land somewhere. The examiner had six points to give away: some for benefits, some for drawbacks, some for a judgement that follows from both. Her answer contains no drawbacks and no judgement. It contains a very good description.
So she picked up two points for the benefit she mentioned in passing, and nothing at all for the other four sentences. Not because they were wrong. Because nobody was buying them.
“The easiest way for me to help you is if you could turn around and say: I only got two out of six because obviously I didn’t answer the question. What did I do wrong?”
Lucy, one of our tutors
Read that again. She isn’t asking for the topic to be retaught. She’s asking students to bring her the exact question they got wrong, with the mark, so the two of them can work out what the examiner wanted and they didn’t give. Most students bring a topic. The useful thing to bring is a failure.
Here’s the answer that got six
“Stem cells offer real clinical benefit: bone marrow transplants already treat leukaemia, and their ability to differentiate makes them promising for Parkinson’s and spinal injury. However, embryonic stem cells raise ethical objections, since obtaining them destroys the embryo. There are also practical drawbacks: cultured cells can be rejected by the immune system, and there is a risk of tumour formation. On balance, adult stem cells are the more defensible route at present, because they avoid the ethical problem while still offering established treatments, even though they are less versatile.”
Notice what’s missing from the six-mark answer. It never defines a stem cell. There’s no mention of pluripotent or multipotent. Yet it holds less biology than the answer that scored two.
So it scores three times as much because it does the job the question asked for. Benefits, drawbacks, a judgement, and a reason for the judgement. That’s the whole trick, and it takes about ten minutes to teach.
Now go and do this with your child’s paper
Find a long answer that disappointed you both. Don’t read the biology. Read the command word, then ask your child to find their own points against the real mark scheme, out loud, one by one.
Most students find two or three, then go quiet, then say something like “oh”. That “oh” is worth more than a term of revision, because for the first time they can see the difference between what they wrote and what was being bought. Any decent A Level Biology tutor will do this in the first hour, and the reason we do it early is that it changes what all the later work is for.
This is also why the subject is harder than its reputation. It looks like a memory test and it isn’t, which we go into in our guide to the real challenges of A Level Biology.
The three habits that close the gap
Read the command word first, before the topic. Describe, explain, evaluate and compare want four different things. Most students read them as one word meaning “write about this”, and that single blur is where a lot of long answers go.
Do the six-markers while your brain is fresh. Plenty of students spend their best thinking on the two-mark questions at the front and arrive at the long answers with nine minutes and nothing left. The long ones carry the grade. So give them the good half of your head. If your child’s aiming at medicine, where the offer is A*AA and one long answer really does matter, our guide to the A Levels you need for medicine is worth ten minutes.
Mark your own work against the real scheme. Not your teacher’s tick. The actual scheme, in your own handwriting, matching your own points. It’s uncomfortable for a fortnight, but then it’s the most useful thing your child does all year.
Send us one disappointing paper
We’ll mark a six-marker with your child and show you exactly where the points went.
Who’d be marking it
Charlotte
Charlotte took a First in Biological Sciences at Oxford and is now doing a PhD. Four years of Oxbridge tutorials trained her to argue a point rather than recite one, which is exactly the muscle a six-marker is testing.
Kriszta
Kriszta specialises in Biology and is blunt about what a sentence actually claims. Students used to writing plenty and scoring little find her feedback uncomfortable for two weeks, then very useful.
Finlay
Finlay reads Medicine at Oxford and placed 12th in his year in Medical Sciences. He coaches medicine applicants, so he knows exactly how much a single long answer is worth when the offer won’t move.
Questions parents ask us
Worth reading next
Improve your child’s biology grade
BRING ONE MARKED PAPER
One six-marker, one real mark scheme, one hour. That’s usually enough to explain the whole grade.
