How to Mark Your Own Work: Using Mark Schemes to Improve Your GCSE and A-Level Grades
Doing practice questions is only half the job. The other half, and the half most students skip, is marking them properly. Marking your own work against the mark scheme shows you exactly where marks are won and lost, and it trains you to think like an examiner. This guide explains how to do it step by step for GCSE and A-Level papers. Why marking your own work works When you simply read a model answer, it all looks obvious. That feeling is called the illusion of competence, and it is one of the main reasons students overestimate how well they know a topic. Marking forces you to compare what you actually wrote with what the examiner wants. That comparison is a form of retrieval practice and feedback, both of which are strongly supported by research on learning. It also reveals patterns. You may find you know the content but lose marks because you do not answer the command word, or you run out of time, or you leave out units. Those are easy fixes once you can see them. What you need befor...
