Your child studies, knows the work, and the mark says otherwise. Often the paper simply ran out: questions never reached, working never written down, answers that were right in the head and absent from the page. These are the cheapest marks in any paper to get back.
Jakobus Kits, Founder·Last updated 13 September 2026
The mark that does not match the effort
Two pupils can know the same work and come out of the same paper with very different marks. The difference is not the studying; it is what happened in 3 hours with a pen. When the effort and the mark disagree, the question worth asking is where the time went.
You know what went into it. The evenings, the notes, the questions redone until they came out. Then the paper comes back and the number has not moved. The natural conclusion is that the studying was not good enough, so the next round is more of it, and the next mark says the same thing.
The last page is thinner than the first, or blank.
Answers appear with no working underneath them.
A question is started, abandoned, and never returned to.
Homework and class tests look fine; the 3-hour paper does not.
Those are not signs of a child who does not know the work. They are signs of a paper that ended before the work did, which is a different problem with a different fix — tutor, or exam technique? is about telling the two apart before you spend on either.
"Not written down", explained
One of the five reasons a mark is lost is Not written down: the working stopped before the mark was earned. The answer can be perfectly correct. The steps that carried marks of their own never reached the page, and a mark that is not on the page cannot be awarded.
It happens two ways, and they feel different to the pupil. Sometimes the clock forces it: the last question is rushed, the working is skipped to save a minute, and the answer stands alone. Sometimes it is habit: the step was obvious, so it was done in the head or on the calculator, and nothing about it reached the paper.
Mathematics. The answer appears without the working that earns the method marks, or the last question is left half-finished because the clock ran out.
Mathematical Literacy. A conclusion is given without the calculation that justifies it, so the marks for the reasoning are never earned.
Physical Sciences. The formula is quoted and the answer written, but the substitution the marking guideline wants to see is missing.
Life Sciences. An explanation stops one step short of the link the question asked for, so half the marks go unclaimed.
Questions never reached
A blank question is the purest version of this problem. The marks were available, the work was known, and the paper ended first. It usually starts early: too long on question one, a stubborn question in the middle, and the last section written in a hurry or not at all.
Nothing about a blank question tells you your child could not do it. That is what makes it so expensive: it is the one loss that is invisible in a total, because it looks exactly like not knowing. The only way to tell the two apart is to look at where in the paper the marks stopped.
The arithmetic is worth doing out loud with your child before the next paper. The total marks and the total minutes are both printed on the front page, and dividing one by the other gives the only budget that matters. A question worth six marks has earned six units of that budget, and not one minute more.
An order of attack
An order of attack is a plan made before the first question is read: which section to write first, how many minutes each one gets, and what to do with a question that will not move. It is decided in the first five minutes of the paper, not in the last twenty.
Read the whole paper first. A few minutes, before anything is written. Your child should know what is coming before committing time to question one.
Work out the minutes per mark , and write the finishing time for each section in the margin.
Start where the marks come easiest. Questions may normally be answered in any order, and confidence early buys clear thinking later.
Set a limit on a stuck question. When it has used the time it is worth, leave it, mark it in the margin, and move on.
Keep the last ten minutes. Not for the hardest question — for the unfinished ones, and for checking.
Showing the method, earning the method marks
Method marks are given for the route, not only for the destination. That means the formula, the substitution, the line before the answer. A pupil who does three steps on a calculator and writes only the result has done the work and shown none of it.
Write the formula down before the numbers go into it.
Write the substitution line, even when the calculator will finish the job.
Keep the working beside the question, not on a loose page that never gets photographed.
Give the units and the final statement the question actually asked for.
This is also the cheapest protection against the other recoverable reason, Accuracy , which the report defines as: the method was right; the arithmetic slipped. When the method is visible, a slip costs the marks attached to the slip. When the page shows only a wrong final answer, there is nothing else on it to credit. Two habits, the same habit: put the thinking where it can be seen.
What a diagnostic adds
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. It separates the marks lost to the clock from the marks lost to not knowing the work.
In that paper, the marks with the right method behind them were the ones lost to accuracy and to working that was never written down. Nothing new had to be learned to get them back. The report arrives within 24 hours, marks within 1 hour, and it names every lost mark, its reason, and the question it came from. You can read a complete one on the sample report page.
What to change first
Change one thing at a time, and change the cheapest thing first. That is almost always the working: steps on the page, in the order they were thought. After that comes the clock, and after that the order of attack. None of it is new content, and all of it is measurable on the next paper.
Give it one paper to show up. If the last page is full the next time, the problem was never the studying.