A report card usually carries more than one number for each subject, and they measure different things. A mark collected in class is not an examination mark, and neither of them is a diagnosis. This guide explains what each number is, what it cannot tell you, and what to ask next.
Jakobus Kits, Founder·Last updated 13 September 2026
Three different numbers
Most South African report cards show a school-based assessment mark, an examination mark and a combined final mark for each subject, often with an achievement level beside it. They are not three versions of the same thing. Each answers a different question, and only one of them describes an exam.
What each number is, and what it can answer. Layouts differ by school.
The number
Where it comes from
What it answers
School-based assessment
Tests, assignments, projects and practicals collected through the year.
Is the work getting done, over months?
Examination mark
One timed paper per subject, or two where the subject is examined in two papers.
What happened in one sitting, under pressure.
Final subject mark
The two combined in a ratio the curriculum sets.
What goes on the record for the year.
Achievement level
The band from 1 to 7 that the final percentage falls into.
Which band the mark is in, not where in the band it sits.
Read them in that order and the report starts to say something. A strong school-based assessment mark next to a weak examination mark is a different problem from two weak marks, and it has a different fix. The final mark hides both, because it is an average. The achievement level hides more: a whole band of percentages arrives as one number. That arithmetic is in Bachelor pass and APS, explained .
What school-based assessment measures
School-based assessment is collected over a term or a year: tests, assignments, projects, practicals and orals, set and marked inside the school against the curriculum’s requirements. It measures work done over months, in conditions that are usually not exam conditions. It is the more forgiving of the two numbers.
Some of it is done at home, where the clock is not running and help is available.
Some of it is written soon after a topic was taught, rather than months later in a paper covering the whole year.
Some of it carries marks for process — a practical, an investigation, a presentation — that a written paper does not award in the same way.
All of it is spread out, so a single bad afternoon does not sink the number.
None of that makes it a soft mark. It measures something real: whether your child keeps up, hands in, and can work when the pressure is ordinary. It is not a measurement of what happens in one sitting with an unseen paper. When the two numbers disagree, that difference is the finding.
What an exam mark measures
An examination mark comes from one paper, written in one sitting, closed book, on the clock. It measures what your child can produce under those conditions, which is not the same as what your child knows. That gap is where recoverable marks live.
An exam mark is a total, and a total is the end of a long subtraction. Marks left the paper one at a time, for reasons the total cannot show: some because the work was not known, some because the method was right and the arithmetic slipped, some because the working stopped before the mark was earned. Those are different problems with different fixes, and Tutor, or exam technique? is about telling them apart.
A report card gives you the size of the problem, not its shape. It cannot tell you which questions the marks were lost in, whether the method was right and the arithmetic slipped, whether the paper ran out of time, or whether the working simply was not written down.
Where in the paper the marks went. Early, late, or spread evenly — each points somewhere different.
Whether the paper was finished. Unanswered questions and wrong answers arrive on the report as the same missing marks.
Whether the method was right. A correct route with one slipped line can look identical to not knowing the work.
Whether the working was written down. Method marks are awarded for what is on the page, not for what was in your child’s head.
Which marks were already within reach. The report gives one number where two would help: the mark, and the mark the same script could have carried.
That last one is the point of taking a paper apart mark by mark rather than reading the total.
Questions to ask the teacher
The teacher has the marked script, which is the one thing a report card leaves out. Ask questions that can be answered from it: where the marks went, whether the paper was finished, whether the working was shown. Ask about the paper in front of them, not about your child in general.
"May I see the marked paper?" The script shows more than the mark on the report does.
"Was the paper finished, or did the last questions go unanswered?"
"Where in the paper did the marks go — early, late, or evenly?"
"Were marks lost for a wrong method, or for working not shown?"
"How much of the final mark is school-based assessment, and how much is the examination?" The split differs by subject and by curriculum.
"Which topics does my child still not have?"
"If one thing changed before the next paper, what should it be?"
Take one subject into that conversation, not seven. A teacher can be precise about one script, and can only generalise about a whole report.
From a report card to a diagnostic
Exam Diagnostics ZA is a South African service that marks a full Grade 10–12 mock exam paper mark by mark and reports every lost mark, with a strategy report and a video walkthrough, within 24 hours. A report card tells you that marks went missing. A diagnostic tells you where they went.
Your child writes a full paper for the right grade at home: 3 timed hours, closed book, no help. Marks come back within 1 hour and the full report within 24 hours, by email and WhatsApp. The whole process is on how it works .
The mark, and the mark that was in reach on the same script.
Every lost mark, sorted into one of five reasons, two of which mean the method was right.
The recoverable marks question by question, the concepts behind them, and a video walkthrough of what to fix first.
Read a complete report before you decide: the sample report is the real thing. A single paper is R299. Mark Recovery, both papers of a subject and a follow-up paper, is R749. Finals Ready, three subjects, is R1,990. Either way, and a paper that turns up fewer than 10 recoverable marks is refunded.
What to do with the next report
Take one subject, not seven. Ask for the marked script, and look at where in the paper the marks went rather than at the number on the front. Then decide which problem you have: work your child does not know, or marks your child is not scoring.