Positive marking?

Basically my question is how exactly does positive marking work?
Is it really as simple as my teacher says?
She says that you only get marked for your correct points and have any incorrect points ignored.
Does that mean that for a 6 mark question where i make 6 correct points intertwined with others which are blatantly wrong I'll still get full marks?

This is specifically for AQA Psychology A/S by the way

Thank you in advance

Reply 1

worthers

Exams used to look for ways to penalize you, but now instead of looking for mistakes the examiners look for correct answers. Of course an essay based question is going to take into account incorrect information, but if you make it up with a near perfect answer you can still score full marks :smile:

Reply 2

pcok

They said in the mark schemes for positive marking not to penalise candidates for errors as they have already penalised themselves in terms of time. However this is very different to "ignore" any errors. If you have written a page, half of which is wrong, you are not going to get top marks because obviously there will be a lot of stuff you haven't included (namely the right version of what you have described incorrectly).

Also, examiners have to mark "top-down" as opposed to "bottom-up", whereby they try to fit you into the top grade boundary, and if you don't fit there, they go to the next one down and so on.

For an example, this is the mark scheme for one of my law exams:

http://www.aqa.org.uk/qual/gceasa/qp-ms/AQA-LAW6-W-MS-JUN06.PDF

Refer to page two.

Reply 3

sammyrj

Wow. I didn't know they did this, and to be honest it seems stupid.

Reply 4

daisy.noble

Just a quick query about positive marking! I had my AS politics exam today and I think that it's positively marked! But basically I realised that in one of my answers I was making a good point but just got a name wrong.. both the first and second name were similar but not right! I was wondering if I will be penalised for this or whether, if the examiner gets my jist then it won't matter?!? Thankss X