Do You Get Marks for Working in GCSE Maths?

What the letters in a mark scheme mean

Open any Edexcel 1MA1 mark scheme and the abbreviations are defined on the same page every time. They are worth knowing, because they tell you exactly which parts of your answer are being paid for.

M and P are the marks that survive a wrong final answer. A depends on them. B does not depend on anything.

• M — method mark, awarded for a correct method or partial method
• P — process mark, awarded for a correct process as part of a problem solving question
• A — accuracy mark, awarded after a correct method or process
• B — unconditional accuracy mark, no method needed
• C — communication mark, for a fully correct statement with no contradiction or ambiguity

One four-mark question, marked three ways

Question 4 of Edexcel Paper 2H in Summer 2024 is a probability and ratio problem with the answer 70. It carries four marks, and the mark scheme splits them P1, P1, P1, A1: three marks for successive stages of the process, one for the number at the end.

That structure produces three very different outcomes for three students. A student who writes 70 and nothing else scores 4. A student who works through all three processes and then mis-multiplies at the last step scores 3. A student who writes a wrong number with nothing above it scores 0 — and would have scored 3 for the same thinking if it had been on the page.

That third student is the reason teachers say show your working. The instruction is not about neatness or about proving you did not cheat. It is about the three marks that were sitting there, already earned, with no way for the examiner to award them.

The rule that surprises students, in both directions

Edexcel's general marking guidance says two things that sound contradictory until you notice they cover different questions. On questions where working is not required, the correct answer should in general be given full marks. On questions that specifically require working, candidates who do not show working will in general get no marks.

So the blanket claim that you always lose marks for a bare answer is false, and the blanket claim that you never need working is also false. Read the command word: "show that", "prove", and any question that tells you to show your working are the ones where the working is the answer.

There is a third rule that catches students who have reverse-engineered a result: if it is clear from the working that a correct answer has been obtained from incorrect working, the instruction is to award zero. Copying an answer from the back of the book and constructing plausible lines above it is worse than leaving it blank.

Writing working an examiner is able to award

Marks are lost to presentation more often than students realise, and always for the same handful of reasons. Put the final answer on the answer line: an answer that appears only substituted back into an equation loses the accuracy mark, though the method marks survive. Do not cross out an attempt unless you are replacing it, because crossed-out work is marked unless a replacement exists.

If you try two methods, commit to one on the answer line. Where a choice of methods is shown, the examiner marks the one leading to the answer given — and if there is no answer on the line, marks both and awards the lower number of marks. An unresolved second attempt can therefore cost you the marks the first attempt had already earned.

In our GCSE classes we mark mocks with the real mark scheme open and write the mark codes in the margin — P1, A0 — rather than a total. It changes the conversation from "you got six" to "you had three of these four and did not write the line that would have shown it".