What Your Prelim Mark Is Actually Telling You

Your child brings home a prelim paper with 54%. Naturally, everyone looks at the number first. Is that good enough? Should we be worried? Did they study enough? Do they need to work harder before finals?

Those are all reasonable questions, but the mark itself is only part of the story. What matters just as much is where the other 46% went, because that tells us far more about what needs to change before the final exams.

A mark tells us what happened. It does not always tell us why it happened. And if we do not understand why marks were lost, the usual response of “you just need to study more” can miss the problem completely.

Prelims are more than a rehearsal

For Grade 12 learners, prelims are obviously valuable practice before the final examinations. Learners get to sit full papers, work under time pressure and experience something much closer to the final exam environment.

But there is another side to prelims that I think is even more valuable: they give us data.

A returned paper shows us what happens when everything comes together — the learner’s subject knowledge, their preparation, the way they interpret questions, their ability to manage time and the way they construct answers.

That means a disappointing prelim result is not simply bad news, and a good result is not simply reassurance. Both can tell us something useful. The important part is knowing what to look for.

Don’t only look at the mark. Look at where the marks went.

A mark tells us what happened. Understanding where the marks went helps us decide what needs to change.

When we look at a paper properly, the lost marks usually start to tell a story.

Sometimes the problem really is a content gap. The learner could not remember the concept, formula, definition or process that the question required. In that case, more revision, better notes and more practice can absolutely help.

But that is only one possibility.

A learner might know the work but misunderstand the question. You read the answer and realise that they actually knew the content — they just did not answer what was being asked. Perhaps they missed a command word, explained when they were supposed to compare, or answered the topic generally instead of dealing with the specific question.

Studying the chapter again will not necessarily fix that. The learner may need to practise reading and interpreting exam questions more carefully.

Then there is timing. Sometimes there are perfectly answerable questions left blank at the end of a paper, not because the learner did not know the work, but because they simply never got there. They may have spent too long on earlier questions, become stuck trying to perfect one answer, or lost track of the clock.

That is not primarily a knowledge problem. It is an exam-management problem, and again, studying harder does not automatically solve it.

Another common issue is the depth of the answer. A question is worth six marks and the learner writes two sentences. Or the opposite happens: they spend ten minutes writing half a page for a two-mark question.

Learners need to develop a feel for how much an answer requires, what the command word is asking them to do and how the marks available guide the depth of the response. That is a different skill from simply knowing the content.

This is why “study harder” isn’t always enough

Imagine a learner loses 20 marks because they genuinely did not know the content. More studying could absolutely help with that.

But what if they lose another 15 marks because they regularly misread questions, another 10 because they do not finish the paper, and several more because their answers are too shallow for the number of marks available?

Suddenly the problem is not simply that they need to study more. There are several different problems, and each one needs a different solution.

This is why properly analysing one poorly answered question can sometimes teach us more than simply sending a learner back to reread another chapter. We need to know what actually went wrong before we can decide what needs to change.

"A mark is an outcome. It isn’t a diagnosis."

A simple thing you can do when the next paper comes back

When the next test or exam paper comes back, try not to start with only, “What mark did you get?”

Ask, “Where do you think you lost the marks?”

Then look at the paper together. Not as an interrogation, and not as a post-mortem, but simply to look for patterns.

Were there questions the learner genuinely did not know? Did they misunderstand instructions? Did they leave questions unanswered? Did the same type of mistake appear several times? Was there something they clearly understood but struggled to communicate properly in the exam?

That conversation is often far more useful than simply deciding whether 54% is “good” or “bad”.

And if your child is in Grade 10 or 11?

The same principle applies, and in many ways this is an ideal time to start.

Exam habits do not suddenly appear in Grade 12. The way a learner manages time, reads questions, checks their work and decides how much to write develops over several years.

If we start identifying those patterns in Grade 10 or 11, there is much more time to improve them before matric. A test does not have to be something a learner writes, receives a mark for and then forgets. It can tell us something about how that learner performs under assessment conditions.

The mark is the beginning of the conversation

When I look at an exam result, I do not only want to know what the learner got. I want to know why they got it, because that is where improvement starts.

A mark is an outcome. It is not a diagnosis.

This way of looking at exam performance is exactly why we developed Exam Intelligence. We use a learner’s actual performance to identify where marks are being lost and what needs to change, rather than simply telling them to study harder and hoping for a different result.

But even if you do nothing else after reading this, try one thing when the next paper comes back: don’t only ask what mark they got. Ask where the marks went.

That question can change the whole conversation.

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Shaati Education is a SACAI-registered distance education provider supporting learners through the South African CAPS curriculum.