'State', 'give', 'identify' and 'define': the easy GCSE marks students throw away

The marks that surprise parents most, when you finally sit down with the mark schemes, aren't the hard questions students get wrong. They're the easy ones they get right and still don't score. A one-mark question, a correct answer sitting there in the handwriting — and no mark. It turns out the student did the thing every conscientious student does: wrote more, to be safe. And the "more" is exactly what costs them. Here's the plain version, parent to parent.

The one-sentence answer

Questions that start with state, give, identify or define are short, low-mark questions that want a brief, exact answer and nothing else — and the most common way to lose the mark is to write too much, because a wrong extra sentence can cancel out the right one.

These are the guaranteed marks

Every exam paper opens, and is dotted throughout, with these small questions — usually 1 or 2 marks each. They test recall and precision, not extended thinking:

• State — give one fact. "State one adaptation of a red blood cell." One thing. No explanation.
• Give — the same demand, different word. "Give a reason why…" wants the reason, briefly.
• Identify — pick out or name the right thing, often from a diagram, graph, table or list. "Identify the independent variable." Name it.
• Define — give the exact technical definition of a term. Not a rough sense of it — the precise meaning the specification uses.

None of these ask your child to explain, justify, compare or evaluate. That's the whole point: they're meant to be quick, bankable marks. A student who knows the content should get nearly all of them. And that's precisely why throwing them away hurts so much — a dropped 1-mark recall question and a dropped hard 6-marker cost exactly the same on the grade boundary. For the full glossary of what each instruction word demands, the GCSE command words guide lays them all out side by side.

The trap: "right plus wrong equals wrong"

This is the rule I wish I'd known years ago, and it's not folklore — it's written into the front of AQA's own mark schemes, in almost these exact words. The general principle examiners follow is: right + wrong = wrong. Each error or contradiction negates a correct response. And if the number of contradictions equals or exceeds the marks available, no marks can be awarded.

Read that again, because it's the heart of the whole thing. If a question is worth one mark, and your child writes the correct answer and a second statement that contradicts it, those two cancel — and they score zero. The correct answer was right there. It got wiped out by the insurance policy.

Here's how it happens in practice. The question says "State one property of a metal." Your child writes: "Metals conduct electricity. They are also poor conductors of heat." The first half is a correct, mark-worthy answer. The second half is wrong. Right plus wrong equals wrong. Nothing.

There's a small mercy in the rule: genuinely neutral extra material — waffle that's neither right nor wrong — isn't penalised. But you can't rely on your child's extra sentence being neutral. The only safe move is to not write it.

I've written a fuller guide on how GCSE mark schemes actually work, because this "list principle" runs through the whole marking system — but for short questions, this one rule is the thing to drill.

Two more precision points that catch students out

Beyond over-writing, two smaller things trip up short answers:

Underlined words are compulsory. In AQA mark schemes, any wording that's underlined is essential — the mark isn't awarded without it. If the scheme for a definition underlines a key word, a paraphrase that skips it scores nothing, however close in meaning. This is why "define" questions reward memorising the precise definition, not just understanding the idea.

"Any two from" means stop at two. When a 2-mark question lists several acceptable answers, the scheme says "any two from". Your child gets marks for the first two correct ones — but if they list five things and one is wrong, that wrong one can pull down a correct one under the same right-plus-wrong rule. Answer the number asked for. Two marks, two things. Don't hedge with a third.

Why "write more to be safe" is exactly backwards

Every instinct says a longer answer is a safer answer. On these questions, the opposite is true, for three reasons:

More words, more chances to contradict yourself. Every extra sentence is another opportunity to say something wrong that cancels the right thing.

Time is a mark too. The rough guide examiners suggest is about one minute per mark. A child spending three minutes writing a paragraph for one mark has stolen two minutes from a 6-marker later in the paper — where extra thinking genuinely does earn more. The long questions and the short ones reward opposite behaviours, which is exactly why students who don't know the distinction bleed marks at both ends. (My guide on how to answer 6-mark questions covers the other end — where writing more, and linking ideas, is the whole game.)

It signals uncertainty. A crisp one-line answer reads as "I know this." A hedged paragraph reads as "I'm not sure, so here's everything." Confidence, on short questions, looks like brevity.

What actually helps at home

You don't need to know the subject at all to catch this one:

• Look at the mark in the margin. One mark? The answer should be about a line. Two marks? Two things, or one thing with a reason — no more.
• If your child has written a paragraph for one or two marks, that's the flag. Ask: "Which single sentence answers it?" — and cut the rest.
• For define questions, check they've learned the exact wording, not just the gist. Ask them to say the definition back word-for-word.
• Remind them: on these questions, answer the question and stop. The extra sentence isn't insurance. It's the risk.

The bigger point

There's something almost unfair about it — the child who cares enough to write more is the one the rule punishes. But once you see it, it's one of the easiest gains in the whole exam: not more revision, not harder content, just the discipline to give the short answer the short questions are asking for. A student who banks every guaranteed mark and then fights for the hard ones is playing the paper the way it's built to be played.

Not sure whether this is the problem costing your child marks? Start with the diagnostic: why you keep losing marks in GCSE exams.

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I'm building Lightbulb Learning for my own daughter — revision that turns the day's actual class topic into a clear evening session, matched to her exam board and year, with practice questions marked the way real mark schemes mark them — short questions and all. If that sounds useful for your child, you can join the early list below and I'll let you know the moment it opens.