BUSS4: The Seven Point Scale for Perfect Paragraphs

This is an idea I’ve developed following the recent tutor2u BUSS4 revision workshops for marking and feeding back to students when building essay skills. Like many of my A2 Business-teaching counterparts, I spent a large proportion of the Easter break marking BUSS4 mock essays. In a bid to help my students develop their paragraph writing skills, I made a note of the common areas for improvement and summarised them into seven key points for writing the ‘perfect’ paragraph:

Keen to focus their efforts with a few weeks to go, I gave my students the above points on a handout, and asked them to write me a ‘perfect’ paragraph in class for a past-paper essay about emerging markets, using these pointers as a checklist. I told the class I would mark them on a simple scale, probably out of 5, so they could identify how far their skills are from ‘perfect’ at the moment. One of my more ‘vocal’ students asked: ‘Miss, why not mark them out of seven, given that there are seven points on your sheet!’ I had to admit that this was better than my idea, and set to marking the paragraphs out of seven.

The comments from my student gave me the idea for the ‘Seven Point Scale’. I could mark the work using the ‘perfect paragraph’ handout as the mark scheme, annotating where each of the points had been demonstrated and which points had been missed. The paragraph is then graded out of seven. The students could then see clearly where they had demonstrated strong skills, and easily identify their areas for improvement; i.e. the missing numbers/annotation.

Below I’ve included a demonstration of this method based on a paragraph produced by one of my students:

The marking was really simple and fast. The students were given a very clear focus on the areas they need to work on for next time, not just the ‘reasonable’ language from the mark scheme. Win, win!

I won’t be using this method as a substitute for marking full essays against the mark scheme, but it I’m hopeful it will be a useful tool in building the skills needed to produce a great essay in BUSS4!