A mark leaves a paper for one of five reasons, and only some of them mean your child did not know the work. This guide explains the five, shows which two come back fastest, and tells you how to find them in a paper your child has already written.
Jakobus Kits, Founder·Last updated 13 September 2026
The five reasons, in the report’s words
Every lost mark is sorted into one of five reasons: wrong method, accuracy, working not written down, a misread, and a definition not remembered. The five are exhaustive, so nothing is filed under bad luck. Naming the reason is what turns a disappointing mark into something you can act on.
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. The five reasons below are the categories that report uses. They are the same five in every subject and every grade, which is what makes two papers written months apart comparable.
Every lost mark is sorted into one of five reasons.
Reason
What it means
Recoverable?
Wrong method
The route chosen could not reach the answer.
No — this is a gap to teach
Accuracy
The method was right; the arithmetic slipped.
Yes — the method was right
Not written down
The working stopped before the mark was earned.
Yes — the method was right
Misread
A value or instruction was taken off the paper wrongly.
No — this is a gap to teach
Didn’t remember
A formula or definition was not recalled in the moment.
No — this is a gap to teach
Read the table as two groups. Wrong method , misread and didn’t remember describe something that was not there on the day: a route that could not reach the answer, a value taken off the paper wrongly, a definition that would not come. Accuracy and not written down describe a paper that gave away marks your child had already earned.
Five categories is a deliberate choice, and “careless” is not one of them. Careless names a temperament, and nothing follows from it. Each of the five points at a different next step: a topic to teach, a checking routine, a rule about writing the working down, a slower read of the question, or a definition learned word for word.
Which of the five come back
Two of the five are recoverable: accuracy, and working not written down. In both the method was right, so the mark was already within reach on the day. The other three are gaps to teach, and they take longer, because your child has to learn something before the mark changes.
Recoverable does not mean easy, and it does not mean the mark was undeserved. It means the knowledge was already there and the paper did not show it. Changing that is a change to how a paper is written rather than to what your child knows, which is why these are the marks to go after first.
Accuracy. A sign dropped in line two, a rounding done too early, a unit left off. Everything after the slip follows correctly and is still measured against a wrong number.
Not written down. An answer with no substitution under it, a conclusion with no calculation behind it, or a last question abandoned when the clock ran out.
The numbers in that example belong to one paper and to nobody else. What carries across is the shape of it: a mark on the page, a mark that was in reach, and a list of the exact questions that separate the two. You can see how a full report lays that out in the sample report .
Why studying more does not fix a method problem
More hours fix a knowledge problem. They do not fix a paper written the wrong way. If the marks are going to accuracy, to working never written down, or to a method chosen in the first thirty seconds of a question, another revision weekend produces the same mark with more effort behind it.
The loop is easy to recognise. The mark comes back low. Your child promises to work harder, and does. The next mark lands in the same place, and now there is an argument about effort on top of a number that has not moved.
Effort is measured in hours. An exam is measured in marks. The two only meet where the hours go into whatever is actually costing the marks, and a percentage on a report card will not tell you what that is. How to read a school report card covers what those numbers do and do not measure.
Studying more also tends to mean studying in the way that is already comfortable: rereading notes, redoing exercises that were done before, working without a clock. None of that touches a paper written in 3 unbroken hours under pressure. Running a timed exam at home sets out how to test the difference this weekend.
Five things worth noticing before you buy anything at all:
The mark barely moves, whatever the term looked like.
Your child can explain a question at the kitchen table and could not get it onto the paper.
The homework book is neat and the exam script is not.
The last question or two are blank, or barely started.
The answer is right and the mark is half, because the working is not there.
Where the opposite is true — a topic your child genuinely cannot do — hours are exactly the right answer, and a tutor may be the best use of them. Tutor, or exam technique? is about that decision, and about telling the two apart before you spend on either.
What to look for in a returned school paper
You can do a rough version of this yourself with a marked paper from school. Sit down with the paper and the marking guideline, and sort every lost mark into one of the five reasons. It takes an evening. It will not be exact, and it will still tell you something.
Do it with your child rather than for them. Go question by question, and at each lost mark ask what happened here. Your child will often know which of the five it was, and saying it out loud is most of the work. Write the reason in the margin and move on.
The last question your child attempted. If the paper stops before the end, the clock took those marks, whatever else went wrong.
Answers with nothing underneath them. Marking guidelines usually allocate marks to the working as well as to the answer.
The first three lines of every long question. An error there that carries through is an accuracy loss, even where every line after it followed correctly.
The command word. “Evaluate” answered as a description, or a three-mark question answered with one point, is a misread rather than a gap.
Definitions given in your child’s own words. Where the guideline wants the exact wording, that is a mark lost to recall rather than to effort.
The size of each group when you are done. The two recoverable groups, added together, are the number you are looking for.
Two things limit this. You may not have the marking guideline, and the guideline is where most of the detail sits. A paper written weeks ago also no longer shows how the time ran, and time is one of the things you most want to see. It is still the cheapest place to start, and it costs you an evening.
What a diagnostic adds
A diagnostic does the same sorting on a full paper written under exam conditions, and puts a number on each group. You get the mark, the mark that was in reach, every lost mark with its reason, the recoverable marks question by question, and a video walkthrough of what to fix first.
It is one paper, 3 timed hours at home, Paper 1 or Paper 2 in the subject you choose. Marks come back within 1 hour and the full report within 24, by email and WhatsApp. If a paper turns up fewer than 10 recoverable marks, it is refunded.