Draft an exam-style question with a real mark scheme

Draft an exam-style question with a real mark scheme

Term 3 is the exam-question season. Year 12s are three weeks from trial exams, Year 9s are working through NAPLAN-style practice, and someone on your corridor has a Year 8 SAC on Wednesday. The piece of the job that quietly eats a Sunday is not the question. It is the mark scheme. A defensible mark scheme, with band descriptors, an exemplar per band, and the traps a real assessor would penalise, is closer to forty focused minutes, so it does not get written. What lands on the desk instead is a question with a vague "5 marks" beside it, and the marking argument that follows on Thursday.

This prompt writes the mark scheme first, then the question that will actually test it.

The prompt

You are helping me design a single exam-style practice question for a [YEAR LEVEL] [SUBJECT] class in an Australian school. The question will be used for [TRIAL EXAM PREP / SAC PREP / END-OF-TERM ASSESSMENT / NAPLAN PRACTICE / REVISION HOMEWORK]. It must sit in the tradition of the assessment style the students will actually meet: [VCAA VCE Study Design / NAPLAN / HSC / QCE / ACARA v9.0 / school-based summative]. If I have named a specific study design, syllabus, or descriptor, use its exact wording and its exact command terms.

You are working in the tradition of backwards assessment design (Wiggins and McTighe on UbD, VCAA advice on writing to the outcome, the AITSL standard on assessment design): write the MARK SCHEME first, then design the question that will elicit exactly that evidence. A question without a mark scheme is a wish. A mark scheme without exemplars is a paragraph nobody uses.

CONTEXT I WILL PROVIDE

- Year level and subject: [E.G. VCE Unit 3 Chemistry, Year 9 English NAPLAN persuasive, Year 8 History]
- The specific study-design outcome, ACARA content descriptor, or NAPLAN element the question tests: [PASTE THE EXACT WORDING. IF UNSURE, PASTE THE CLOSEST THING YOU HAVE.]
- What the class has actually been taught this term on this outcome: [2 TO 3 LINES. THIS IS WHAT THE QUESTION MAY LEGITIMATELY DRAW ON.]
- The question format I need: [SHORT ANSWER / EXTENDED RESPONSE / MULTIPLE CHOICE WITH JUSTIFY / STIMULUS-BASED / DATA-BASED / SOURCE ANALYSIS / PERSUASIVE WRITING]
- The marks and expected time: [E.G. 6 MARKS, 9 MINUTES. IF UNSURE, TELL ME THE VCAA / NAPLAN CONVENTION FOR THIS FORMAT.]
- Difficulty target: [ACCESS / ON-STANDARD / STRETCH / A-BAND DISCRIMINATOR]. On-standard is the default.
- Optional cohort context: [E.G. "6 EAL LEARNERS, 2 STUDENTS SIT AT E1, TOP 4 ARE PUSHING FOR STUDY SCORE 40+"]

RETURN, IN THIS EXACT ORDER

1. THE MARK SCHEME (WRITE THIS FIRST, BEFORE THE QUESTION)
List the marks in order of what a student would need to say to earn each one. One mark per row. Each row names:
- The specific piece of evidence the student must produce (a term used correctly, a step of working, a piece of textual analysis, a data trend named with a value)
- The command-term standard (if the question uses "explain", say what "explain" requires at this year level; if it uses "evaluate", say the same)
- What DOES NOT earn the mark (the common near-miss the examiner report calls out: naming the trend without a value, naming the technique without linking it to effect, quoting without analysing, defining without applying)

2. THE QUESTION
The single question, worded exactly as it should appear on the paper. Use the correct command term for the mark scheme you just wrote. Include any stimulus (data table, source extract, image description, quote) inline. If a stimulus is not needed, do not invent one to fill space. The question must be answerable in the time you gave me, using only what the class has been taught.

3. EXEMPLAR RESPONSES AT THREE BANDS
Write three sample student responses, each labelled with the mark it would earn out of the total:
- A LOW BAND response (roughly 30 to 40 percent): a student who has half the concept and half the command term. Show the specific errors and omissions the mark scheme calls out.
- A MIDDLE BAND response (roughly 55 to 65 percent): a student who has the content but does not fully meet the command term. Show what they earn and what they miss.
- A HIGH BAND response (roughly 85 to 95 percent, one short of full marks): a student who earns almost everything, so I can see what the last mark actually requires.

Do NOT write a full-marks response. If a student sees a full-marks exemplar in class, they memorise it. A near-full exemplar teaches the shape without giving them the answer.

4. THE THREE TRAPS
List the three specific mistakes an examiner report on THIS outcome would call out year after year. For each, name:
- The mistake, in a student's own likely words or working
- Why it is sticky (why a smart student walks into it anyway)
- The one sentence I should say in class before students attempt this question, to close the trap without giving away the answer

5. FOR MY EYES ONLY (SEPARATE BLOCK, CLEARLY LABELLED, DO NOT PRINT)
- One sentence naming whether the question I asked for is actually testing the outcome I named, or whether it drifts into an adjacent outcome. Adjacency happens constantly and is where SAC moderation arguments start.
- One sentence naming any student in the cohort context I gave you who might be over-served or under-served by this question (e.g. an EAL student on a stimulus-heavy source question), and one small adjustment that does not lower the standard.
- One sentence on whether this question would sit comfortably in a VCAA / NAPLAN / HSC paper as written, or whether a real examiner would tighten one particular word.

RULES

- Australian English throughout. Realise, colour, behaviour, analyse. Year 9, not 9th grade.
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses, semicolons only. Regular hyphens in compound words are fine.
- Use the actual command terms from the syllabus I named (VCE "evaluate" is not NAPLAN "explain"). Do not invent a command term that does not appear in the assessment tradition.
- The question must not depend on content the class has not been taught this term. If the outcome requires prior knowledge I did not confirm was covered, name the gap in one line and stop.
- No trick questions. A high-difficulty question tests deep understanding, not misdirection.
- No US contexts (dollars-and-cents, baseball, prom night, the moon landing as a persuasive prompt). Australian contexts, or content-neutral where the syllabus demands it.
- No politically live persuasive prompts for practice work (immigration policy, voice-to-parliament debates, current federal-election framings). Pick topics that let the class practise the skill without turning the classroom into a debate.

If any of the following are true, STOP and tell me before drafting:
- The outcome or descriptor I named is a whole-unit outcome, not one testable in a single question. Ask me to narrow to a single testable proposition.
- The format I named does not match the outcome (e.g. multiple choice for a "construct an extended response" outcome). Tell me the mismatch before writing.
- The class has not yet been taught the content the outcome requires. Tell me the content gap before writing a question that will punish them for the gap.
- The task is a summative that will count toward reporting (a school-based SAC that carries a moderated grade). Tell me the question is fine to use as PRACTICE but that a graded SAC should not be drafted here without a moderation partner and the study-design conditions checked.

What it does well

Writing the mark scheme first is the whole trick. It is what stops the question drifting into "test whatever the stimulus makes possible" and back into "test the outcome I said I was testing". The three-band exemplars are the second earn. They show your class what the shape of a middle response actually looks like, which is where most Year 12s are actually sitting, and the deliberate near-miss on the top band stops the class memorising a ceiling. The examiner-trap section is the third: it names the year-after-year mistakes the assessor report calls out, and gives you the one sentence to say before the exam that closes the trap without giving away the answer.

Where it falls over

Two honest limits. The model has read the public examiner reports, but it has not marked the last three years of VCAA Chemistry papers with a senior assessor sitting next to it. On subjects with a small VCAA cohort, or on brand-new study designs where no examiner report exists yet, the "three traps" section will be plausible rather than authoritative. Cross-check the traps with a colleague who was on the panel. Second, the exemplars are calibrated to a research-derived middle. Your Year 12s are not the median VCE cohort in Victoria, they are your cohort, and a middle-band exemplar for a top-set class will land as an insult. Adjust the difficulty target upward before you print. And a real SAC still needs a moderation partner. This is for practice, not for a graded piece.

Try it like this

For VCE Unit 3 Chemistry, three weeks from trial exams: paste in the exact AoS 1 outcome and the two topics the class did last week. Ask for a 6-mark stimulus-based question on redox with a mark scheme that gives one mark per correct half-equation, one for direction of electron flow, one for identification of oxidising agent, and so on. The exemplars will show your Year 12s exactly where the last mark disappears.

For a Year 9 NAPLAN persuasive practice: paste the marking criteria for audience, text structure and language. Ask for a persuasive prompt on an Australian topic (a school-uniform policy, screen time in primary schools, whether canteens should be cashless) with a mark scheme that treats each criterion separately and a middle-band exemplar the class can pull apart on Friday.

For a Year 7 History end-of-term short-answer question on the Roman Empire: paste the ACARA v9.0 descriptor. Ask for a 4-mark question that requires students to link a specific technology (roads, aqueducts, concrete) to a specific consequence (movement of legions, urbanisation) using the command term "explain". The traps section will tell you the two students who will list without linking.

If you only have ten minutes tonight: fill in the year level, subject, outcome and format. Skip the difficulty target and the cohort context. The mark scheme alone is the piece worth having. You can hand-write the question in three minutes once you know what it must produce.

Write the mark scheme, then the question. The order is the whole job.