Two of the five reasons a mark is lost look identical on a marked page: an answer that is simply wrong. One of them is a slip in the arithmetic and comes back cheaply. The other is a question read wrongly, and that one is a gap to teach.
Jakobus Kits, Founder·Last updated 13 September 2026
Two reasons that look the same
Accuracy means the method was right; the arithmetic slipped. Misread means a value or instruction was taken off the paper wrongly. On the page both produce a wrong answer. In the report they are separated, because only one of the two is recoverable. The difference decides what you do next.
Two of the five reasons a mark is lost. Only the first one comes back.
Reason
What it means
Recoverable?
Accuracy
The method was right; the arithmetic slipped.
Yes — the method was right
Misread
A value or instruction was taken off the paper wrongly.
No — this is a gap to teach
Picture two wrong answers in the same paper. In the first, your child meant to divide by three and wrote the result of dividing by two. Everything around it is right, and the wrong number is a slip. In the second, the question gave a length in millimetres and your child worked in centimetres. What followed was faultless. It answered a question that was not on the paper.
Why one comes back and the other does not
A slip is a lapse in a process your child already runs correctly, so a checking routine catches most of them. A misread is not a lapse: the wrong question was answered carefully and completely. Nothing about checking the arithmetic finds it, because the arithmetic was right.
That is why the report counts one as recoverable and the other as a gap to teach. A slip is caught by a routine your child can learn in an afternoon. A misread is caught only by reading differently, and reading is a habit that takes a term rather than an afternoon. Misreads do leave fingerprints, though: they gather where the words are.
Mathematical Literacy. A value is taken off the wrong row of a table, or a tariff bracket is read one line out, and every answer built on it follows the mistake.
Life Sciences. The command word is missed: "explain" answered as "describe", or a two-mark question answered with one point.
Economics. The command word is misread, so the answer explains where the question asked the pupil to evaluate.
Business Studies. The scenario in the case study is not used, so a technically correct answer earns nothing.
Where slips happen: units, signs, rounding, calculator mode
Four places come up again and again. A unit left unconverted. A sign dropped or reversed. A rounding done in the middle instead of at the end. And a calculator left in the wrong mode, which turns every trigonometry answer in the paper wrong while the method stays perfect.
Units. Millimetres used as centimetres, minutes as hours, a rate given per month and used per year. Convert once, early, and write the unit beside every line.
Signs. A minus dropped in line two carries through to an answer marked wrong, even though everything after the slip was right.
Rounding. Round in the middle of a calculation and the final answer drifts. Keep the full value on the calculator and round once, at the end, to what the question asked for.
Calculator mode. Degrees, not radians, and the memory cleared. The fix takes a second before the paper starts and cannot be made afterwards.
The pattern differs by subject. In Accounting one figure posted to the wrong side takes every total built on top of it, and in Mathematics a dropped sign does the same to a whole question. The method was never the problem in either.
A checking routine for the last ten minutes
Keep the last ten minutes for checking, and check in a fixed order rather than re-reading the paper from the start. Re-reading drifts; a routine finds slips. Units, then signs, then rounding, then the command word on every question there was any doubt about.
Units first. Every answer: does it carry the unit the question asked for?
Signs next. Any line where a minus could have gone missing, and any answer that came out negative when it should not have.
Rounding third. Decimal places, to the number the question specified.
Then the command word , on anything that felt uncertain: is the answer the thing that was asked for?
Last, the unfinished questions. A visible method is worth more than a blank space.
Ten minutes is not long, and that is the point: a fixed order gets through it. Starting again at question one does not, because attention drifts back to the questions that felt good. It is also why the last ten minutes should never be spent on the hardest question in the paper.
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. Every lost mark is sorted into one of five reasons, so a slip and a misread stop looking the same.
In that paper the marks in reach were the accuracy losses and the working that was never written down. The misreads were counted separately and left out of the number in reach, because they are not recovered by writing more carefully. That is the honest version: some marks come back cheaply, some have to be taught, and the point of sorting them is knowing which is which. Marks arrive within 1 hour and the full report within 24. You can read a complete one on the sample report page.
What to say to your child
Do not tell your child to be more careful. It is advice with nothing to do in it. Give the routine instead: units, signs, rounding, command word, in that order, in the last ten minutes of every paper. A routine survives the pressure of an exam; an instruction to concentrate does not.
Write the four words on a card and keep it in the pencil case. Four checks, ten minutes, every paper, until nobody has to remember it.