The Answer Was Right and the Marks Still Went

20 August 2026 · by Larry

The paper comes back. You find the question, you check the answer against the one at the bottom of the page, and it is correct. And then you look at the mark next to it and it is not the mark you expected.

This one produces more confusion at the kitchen table than almost anything else, because from the child's point of view it looks like unfairness. They got it right. Somebody took marks away anyway.

They did not, quite. But explaining what actually happened is worth doing properly, because the fix is small and the version most parents reach for — "you must show your working" — is the version children ignore.

What a multi-mark question is actually asking

A question worth one mark wants one thing: the answer.

A question worth several marks is not asking for a bigger number. It is asking for a route. The marks are spread across the steps — recognising what has to be found first, doing that correctly, using that result properly, and arriving at a final answer stated in a form somebody can read. The last number on the page is one part of that, not all of it.

So a correct final answer with nothing else on the page has, from the marker's side, no evidence of the steps that the question was mostly about. That is not a teacher being difficult. It is the question doing what it was written to do.

The six places the marks quietly go

In practice, almost all of it is one of these.

The working happened, but not on the paper. This is the most common by far, and it is not laziness. The child worked it out in their head, or on a scrap of the question paper, or in the margin, and then wrote down the number. From where they are sitting the work was done. From where the marker is sitting it never existed.
No final statement. A bare number sitting after a line of sums is not an answer to a question about how many apples are left. The answer line wants a sentence, or at minimum the number with what it refers to.
Units missing or mixed. Dollars written where cents were asked for, centimetres where metres were wanted, or a number with no unit at all. This one hurts because the maths was entirely right.
The model was drawn but not labelled. A bar model with no numbers on it and no indication of which part is which is a picture rather than a piece of reasoning. Labelled, it can earn marks even if the arithmetic afterwards goes wrong.
The instruction in the question was skipped. "Give your answer in the simplest form", "correct to the nearest whole number", "in terms of". These are marks sitting in the question text, and they are lost by a child who was concentrating hard on the sums.
The answer never reached the answer line. Worked out correctly halfway down the space, then not transferred. Markers mark what is on the line.

None of those are a failure of understanding. Which is exactly why they are worth fixing — this is the cheapest set of marks in the whole paper.

The argument that actually persuades a child

Telling a child to show their working sounds, to them, like being told to do extra writing for no reason. They already know the answer. Why write more?

Here is the version that lands, and it is true:

Working is not for the teacher. It is what saves you when you get it wrong.

Two children make the same small slip in the middle of a long question and both end up with the wrong final answer. The one who wrote nothing gets nothing. The one who showed the steps keeps the marks for every step that was right, and loses only the one that was not.

Framed as insurance rather than as obedience, it stops being an argument about effort. It is a straightforwardly good deal, and children recognise a good deal.

The same slip, incidentally, is usually one of the ordinary careless mistakes rather than a gap in understanding — which is another reason not to let one of them take a whole question down with it.

How to ask for it without a fight

"Show your working" is an instruction, and instructions get resisted. Questions do not.

"How would I know you didn't guess?" This reframes the page as something a reader has to follow, which is what it is. It usually gets a much better response than being told to write more.
"What did you have to find out first?" Ask it before they start, not after. Most lost method marks are on the first step, and saying that step out loud is nearly the same act as writing it down.
Have them write the answer statement first, with a gap. "The shop sold ___ cakes." Then fill in the number at the end. It sounds like a trick and it removes two of the six failures above at once — the missing statement and the missing units.
Read the question back and underline the instruction. Simplest form, nearest whole number, how many more. Ten seconds, and it is the same skill that stops word problems going wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the maths.
Look at one question together, not the whole paper. Pick the one where the answer was right and the marks were not. That single question makes the point better than a general rule ever will, and it keeps the conversation short — which is most of what makes homework checking survivable.

What not to do

Do not turn this into a neatness campaign. A child who is already finding the maths hard does not need a second set of rules about presentation stacked on top; that is how a fixable habit becomes a reason to dread the subject.

And do not ask for working on questions that do not need it. If a question is worth one mark and the answer is one number, writing out three lines beneath it teaches nothing except that the adult wants writing. Children are quick to notice a rule that is applied without judgement, and they discount everything that comes with it.

The short version

A multi-mark question is asking for a route, not a number, so a bare correct answer leaves most of what was being marked invisible. The marks usually go in six ordinary places: working done in the head, no final statement, missing units, an unlabelled model, an instruction in the question skipped, and an answer never transferred to the answer line. None of them are about ability. Ask "how would I know you didn't guess?" rather than "show your working", get the answer statement written before the sums, and look at one question rather than the whole paper.

On word problems, the marks usually live in the drawing rather than the answer — see bar models: what your child is being taught and how to help.

If a paper is coming up soon, two weeks before a maths exam covers what that time can and cannot fix.

A common reason working never gets practised at all: everything is done on a tablet, where nobody asks for it — see when your child can do it on screen but not on paper.

If the drop was across the whole paper rather than on one kind of question, what to check first when maths marks drop suddenly goes through it in order.

From P5 this stops being an occasional annoyance and becomes most of the paper — see what changes between P4 and P5.

Try the free maths practice →