These mistakes show up everywhere, not just on one board

Regardless of which board or qualification you're sitting, the same handful of mark-scheme mistakes account for a disproportionate amount of lost marks. None of them are about not knowing the content — they're about how that knowledge gets translated into marks on the page, which is a separate, learnable skill.

Not showing your working

On any calculation or multi-step question, method marks are available specifically so a correct approach with a small slip still earns credit — but only if the working is actually written down. A correct final answer with no working shown can lose marks if it's wrong, and a wrong final answer with no working shown earns nothing at all, even if your approach was almost entirely right.

Misreading the command word

"Describe", "explain", "evaluate" and "discuss" each ask for a genuinely different kind of answer, and mark schemes allocate marks accordingly. Writing a detailed description when the question asked you to evaluate caps your mark regardless of how accurate or detailed that description is, because the marks for evaluation simply aren't available to a description-only answer.

Writing length instead of writing to the question

A longer answer is not automatically a better one. Mark schemes reward hitting the specific assessment criteria for that question, not word count — padding an answer with accurate-but-irrelevant detail doesn't earn extra marks and costs you time you needed for other questions.

Ignoring the number of marks available

The marks allocated to a question are a direct signal for how much development it needs. A 2-mark question generally wants two clear, distinct points; a 12-mark question wants sustained development, examples and (often) evaluation. Treating every question with the same level of brevity or depth regardless of its mark value reliably under- or over-shoots what's actually being asked.

Not addressing every part of a multi-part question

Many questions quietly contain more than one task — "explain X and evaluate Y" is two jobs in one question. Answering only the first part you noticed and treating the question as finished leaves marks on the table that were always available, just unaddressed.

Revising with ExamPass.ai

AI marking on ExamPass.ai breaks feedback down by exactly where marks were gained or lost against the mark scheme — so if one of these patterns is costing you marks, it shows up specifically rather than just as a lower-than-expected overall score.