Mark Scheme

All questions are marked using the level descriptors printed after this scheme, applied to the three assessment strands weighted equally: knowledge and understanding of the text, analysis of the writer's craft, and organisation and expression of argument. Indicative content below is not exhaustive; reward any well-supported reading. Under no circumstances credit assertion unsupported by textual reference, however fluently written.

Section A — Module 1

Question 1

The candidate must write on a studied play and must connect generational conflict to theme, not merely describe a quarrel. An answer that narrates a series of arguments between older and younger characters without identifying what those arguments are about thematically cannot exceed Level 2. Indicative approaches:

• Generational conflict as a vehicle for social change: the older character embodies an inherited order — respectability, religion, deference, the value of land or of endurance — while the younger embodies mobility, education, migration or political impatience. Reward candidates who show that the dramatist gives the older position genuine strength rather than making it a straw target, since the play's interest usually lies in the cost of both positions.
• Conflict as a vehicle for the past's claim on the present: inherited debt, an unspoken family history, a house or piece of land that must be kept or sold. The dispute over an object frequently carries the theme, and candidates should analyse how the dramatist loads that object with meaning.
• Structural handling: whether the conflict is stated in the opening scene and complicated, or withheld and revealed; whether it is resolved, displaced onto a third character, or deliberately left open at the curtain. An unresolved ending is often the dramatist's thematic statement, and strong candidates argue this rather than treating it as a failure of the play.
• Dramatic technique: the distribution of stage time between the generations; differences of register, dialect and vocabulary that make the conflict audible; the use of a mediating character (a spouse, a child, an outsider) whose alignment shifts; silences and interruptions; the placing of the conflict's climax relative to the interval or the final curtain. Marks are earned by quotation and analysis of specific lines and moments. Reward candidates who acknowledge that the audience's sympathy is directed by staging and by what the dramatist chooses not to dramatise. Do not credit biographical speculation about the dramatist's own family.

Question 2

Extract-based; the analysis must be grounded in this text. Indicative content:

• Dialogue and character: Neville speaks in complete argumentative sentences building to a rhetorical climax ("And the pipe still here, and the tank they promise still not here, and you still standing in this line"), the triple structure conveying a young man rehearsing a grievance he has thought about at a distance. Miss Adina speaks in short, flat, declarative lines and never argues; her authority is expressed through refusal ("The line is not the worst part") rather than assertion. Reward candidates who notice that she asks nothing and concedes nothing, and that Neville's questions put him in the weaker position within the exchange despite his greater volume of speech.
• The withheld gesture: the stage direction (not letting go) dramatises the whole relationship before either character has explained anything, and the delayed release — (She hands him the bucket at last.) — is the extract's turning point. Strong candidates note that the direction "at last" measures duration for a reader and controls timing for a performer, and that what passes between the two is authority, not merely a bucket.
• The pause: (a pause; she looks along the empty road) is the extract's dramatic centre. The pause creates expectation of a large statement; the "empty road" gives the audience an image of absence — no water lorry, no official, nobody coming — before Miss Adina names it. Credit candidates who observe that the road is empty in exactly the way the promise is empty, and that the play thereby makes a political point without a political speech.
• The line "That nobody in the line surprised": the extract's thematic key. The subject is not the drought but the normalisation of neglect; expectation itself has been eroded. Reward any candidate who identifies that the grandmother's complaint is more radical than the grandson's, since he is angry at a failure while she is describing a condition.
• Register and idiom: the Caribbean vernacular ("since before your mother born", "Is the walking that spill it") is used without condescension and carries the aphoristic authority of proverb. The closing exchange works as a double meaning: literally a warning about carrying a full bucket, and metaphorically a judgement on the young man's confidence — capability is not the difficulty, the distance is. Candidates who read this line only literally cap at Level 2; the discriminating response explains that the play closes the extract on a proverb the audience must unpack.
• Situation and larger concerns: water as a public good and a daily labour borne by an elderly woman; the returning migrant's outsider perspective; endurance against impatience; the unbuilt tank as the visible sign of an absent state. Reward comment on the title, The Standpipe — a shared, public, communal object, and the place where the village's condition is most visible. Do not require candidates to cover all three named techniques equally, but an answer treating only dialogue cannot exceed Level 3, since the question names three.

Section B — Module 2

Question 3

The candidate must argue about the relationship between form and meaning across two poems. An answer on one poem caps at Level 2. An answer that describes the form of each poem — counting lines, naming the rhyme scheme — without connecting form to meaning caps at Level 2 however accurate the description. Indicative approaches:

• Fixed forms as meaning: the sonnet's volta enacting a turn of thought or a reversal of feeling; the sestina or villanelle's compulsory repetition enacting obsession, grief or inescapability; the ballad stanza's public, communal, oral quality suiting narrative of shared experience.
• Free verse as meaning: line-break as breath, hesitation or emphasis; enjambment holding a sense across a break to create suspension or to allow a line to mean two things; the isolated single-line stanza as silence or shock; irregular stanza lengths as a refusal of resolution.
• Sound as structure: metre and departures from it — a substituted foot or a broken line falling exactly where the poem's argument breaks; rhyme used to link words that the argument sets in tension; half-rhyme as unease; the movement from regularity to irregularity, or the reverse, across a poem's span.
• Form against content: a poem whose subject is disorder written in strict form, so that the constraint itself is expressive. Reward candidates who argue this counter-case, since it tests the proposition rather than merely illustrating it.
• The top band requires evaluation of the statement, not only illustration. Credit candidates who qualify it — for instance by arguing that a poem's form can be conventional and largely inert, so that form is part of meaning by degree rather than absolutely, or by distinguishing form chosen from form inherited. Comparison must be genuine: two separate essays stapled together cap at Level 3 however good each half.

Question 4

Extract-based analysis of the printed poem. Indicative content:

• Opening line: "They board the windows first, then the heart" turns a literal preparation into a metaphor within a single line, and the zeugma is the poem's thesis — the same defensive labour is performed on the house and on the feelings of the people in it. Reward candidates who note that the emotional subject is announced immediately and then not mentioned again until the last line, so the poem's centre is left deliberately unspoken.
• Sound and repetition: "hammer, nail, hammer" reproduces the rhythm of the work itself; "the small tin sound / of a house preparing to be alone" makes the building the subject of the emotion, displacing feeling onto the object — a strategy the whole poem sustains.
• The parents' contrasted actions: the mother fills the bath (practical, sufficient, forward-looking); the father counts the candles twice, "as though the second count / could add one". This is the poem's most delicate psychological observation — a futile action performed for its own consolation, revealing anxiety the character will not voice. Strong candidates connect this to the father's silence in the final stanza.
• The almond tree: "already practising" personifies the tree as a pupil; "bends / and does not break, bends and does not break" repeats the phrase across a line break so that the reader physically performs the bending. The simile "like someone learning to say a difficult word" is the poem's central image and rewards close attention: it converts endurance into speech, suggests that survival is an acquired skill rather than a virtue, and prepares for the human silence at the end.
• Tonal shift and irony: "the road is a river carrying / other people's furniture politely away" — "politely" is the poem's most disturbing word, the incongruous decorum making the loss worse, and "other people's" locating the speaker's family as spared observers. Credit candidates who discuss the discomfort of that vantage point.
• The ending: "Nothing of ours has moved" is ambiguous — physically intact, emotionally unmoved, or unable to move on. The mother's spoken "We were lucky" is set against the father's saying "nothing at all", and the poem closes with him beginning "with the claw / of the hammer, to take the house apart again". The hammer returns from line two but reversed, claw rather than head, unmaking what was made; the boarding-up of the heart is not undone. Reward candidates who read the cyclical ending as the poem's argument: that the season will return, and that the labour of defence is permanent.
• Structure: five tercets, unrhymed and irregular in metre, the stanza breaks used against the syntax so that sense repeatedly runs over a gap, enacting the way the event overflows the ordinary units of family life. The single sustained present-tense movement gives immediacy; the shift to "By morning" is the only large temporal jump and it lands on the aftermath rather than the storm — the storm itself is never described. A top answer identifies that omission and argues its effect. Candidates who merely list devices without effect cap at Level 2. Candidates who identify effects but do not quote cap at Level 2.

Section C — Module 3

Question 5

The candidate must write on a studied prose text and must argue about narrative point of view, not simply about characterisation. An answer that discusses the central character with no sustained attention to how the narration presents that character cannot exceed Level 2. Indicative approaches:

• First-person narration: intimacy and immediate access to consciousness set against restricted knowledge; the reader's dependence on a narrator who may be self-deceiving, defensive or unreliable. Reward candidates who identify the specific textual signals by which a writer allows the reader to see past the narrator — inconsistency, over-insistence, other characters' reported speech, gaps in the account.
• Retrospective first person, in which an older narrating self judges a younger experiencing self, producing irony, tenderness or self-reproach; the strongest candidates distinguish the two voices and locate places where they are in tension.
• Third-person limited narration: free indirect discourse allowing the character's idiom to colour the narration, so that judgement and sympathy are managed simultaneously; the effect of the moments where the narration withdraws from the character's mind.
• Omniscient narration: the shaping power of a narrator who may judge, contextualise or move between minds; irony generated when the reader is given knowledge a character lacks.
• Shifting or multiple perspectives, and the effect of hearing a character described by others before or instead of hearing from them directly; the withholding of a perspective as a means of preserving mystery or of enacting a character's marginality.
• The discriminating argument concerns control of sympathy: the top band shows that the reader's judgement of the character is manufactured by narrative choice and would alter under a different point of view. Reward candidates who test this by considering how a scene would read if narrated by another character.

Question 6

Extract-based. Indicative content:

• Narrative voice: third person, closely aligned with Mr Ramsingh, with free indirect discourse carrying his own reasoning: "because a shop that opens is a shop, and a shop that does not open is a room with things in it". The chiastic, self-justifying construction belongs to the character rather than to the narrator, and the effect is sympathetic without being sentimental — the reader is invited to recognise the argument as both true and a consolation. Reward candidates who identify the narrative distance precisely: close enough for pity, far enough for irony.
• Detail and repetition: the number forty-one recurs four times, and its unchanging value carries the story's meaning without a word of explicit statement. The counting is ritual rather than commerce; the moving of each tin "an inch to the left ... so that the counting would leave a mark" is the passage's finest touch, a man arranging for his own effort to have physical evidence. Credit candidates who connect this to the closing image of handwriting: both are ways of making an unwitnessed life leave a trace.
• Dust: "The dust came away on his thumb in a clean grey line" is the objective proof of stasis — the tins have not moved because nothing has been sold — but the word "clean" also carries his care and self-respect. The image conveys decline while preserving the character's dignity, which is the balance the whole passage strikes.
• The contrast with the new shop: its lights already on against a shop opened at seven for nobody; "its trolleys nested one inside the other like a good idea" is the passage's sharpest simile — efficient, replicable, impersonal, and admiring in a way that makes the threat worse. The girl "wrote quickly, the way people write when the words are not theirs" contrasts corporate, borrowed language with the inherited, personal standard of Mr Ramsingh's handwriting. Reward candidates who see that the new shop is not made contemptible; the story's sympathy is not purchased by caricature.
• The final sentence: the handwriting "taught to him by a man who believed that a figure badly formed was a lie half told" introduces, in one clause, an entire inherited ethic — accuracy as a moral quality, a trade learned from a person rather than a system. It also lands with irony, since the figure Mr Ramsingh forms so carefully records a business that is failing. Strong candidates argue that this is the passage's thematic close: what is being displaced is not only a shop but a way of understanding work.
• Situation and theme: the small trader displaced by the supermarket; ritual as a defence against acknowledgement; dignity in obsolescence; the recording of a life that is not being lived. The title, "The Inventory", names both the counting and the larger stocktaking the character will not consciously perform. Reward economy of expression. Do not credit invented biography for Mr Ramsingh beyond what the text supports, or moral condemnation of the new shop that the passage does not license.

Level descriptors

Applied to every question.

• Level 4 (20–25): A sustained argument that answers the question set, controlled from the opening paragraph and developed rather than repeated. Close, accurate reference throughout, with short apt quotation analysed rather than merely produced — the candidate discusses word choice, sound, structure and effect. Literary technique is identified precisely and its effect explained. The candidate shows awareness of the text as something made, discussing the writer's choices rather than treating characters as people or events as facts. Where the question sets a proposition, it is genuinely tested. Fluent, accurate, economical expression.
• Level 3 (15–19): Sound understanding and a relevant argument, but development is uneven. Quotation is apt but sometimes left to speak for itself, and technique is more often named than explained. Some drift into narration or description of content. Comparison, where required, is present but unbalanced. Expression clear with minor errors.
• Level 2 (8–14): Largely narrative or paraphrase, with the question addressed at the beginning and end but not sustained. Reference is general, quotation sparse or unattached to any point. Devices are listed with no account of effect. Characters are discussed as real people. Assertion in place of evidence.
• Level 1 (1–7): Very limited understanding; substantial irrelevance, misreading or plot summary alone; little or no reference to the text; expression obscures meaning.

Sample Answers with Examiner Commentary

Question 4 — Sample Answers

Grade I (Distinction) answer (extract)

"The poem's argument is contained in its first line and then withheld for fourteen. 'They board the windows first, then the heart' performs its work in a single verb: the same hands do the same protective labour to the house and to the feelings of the people inside it, and the poem's whole method — the displacement of emotion onto objects — is established before we know who is speaking.

That method governs the second stanza. We are not told that the family is afraid. We are told that the mother fills the bath and that the father counts the candles 'twice, as though the second count / could add one'. The line break falls precisely on the moment of futility, so that we, like him, briefly entertain the possibility before the next line withdraws it. This is a man managing fear by doing something, and the poem observes it without comment, which is what makes it moving rather than sentimental.

The almond tree is the poem's centre. It is 'already practising', a word that makes endurance a skill rather than a virtue — something the tree has had to learn because this happens every year. The repetition, 'bends / and does not break, bends and does not break', is placed across a line break so that the reader's eye performs the bending, and then the simile arrives: 'like someone learning to say a difficult word'. The comparison seems at first to run the wrong way, explaining a natural process by a human one, until we see that this is precisely the point: the tree is teaching the family, and what it teaches is articulation under pressure. It prepares for the father who, at the end, cannot say anything at all.

The tone turns with a single adverb. The flood carries 'other people's furniture politely away', and the decorum of 'politely' is more disturbing than any violence would be, while 'other people's' quietly places this family among the spared. 'Nothing of ours has moved' is therefore triple: nothing was lost, nothing was felt, nothing has changed.

The last image completes the structure. The hammer returns from the second line, but reversed — 'the claw / of the hammer' — and the father begins 'to take the house apart again'. The boards come down; the boards over the heart do not. The word 'again' is the poem's last and hardest, because it tells us this is a season, that it will return, and that the labour of defence is not an event but a condition."

Mark: 24/25. Examiner commentary: Level 4 throughout. The candidate has an argument — that the poem displaces feeling onto objects — and tests it against every stanza rather than restating it. Quotation is short and always analysed: the reading of the line break after "the second count" and of the reversed hammer at the close are precise observations about craft, not decoration. The treatment of "practising" and of the simile is outstanding, particularly the recognition that the comparison appears to run the wrong way and the argument for why it does. "Politely" is identified as the tonal hinge, and the triple reading of "Nothing of ours has moved" is properly grounded rather than ingenious for its own sake. A mark is withheld only because the poem's stanza form is not addressed, and the question names structure; a sentence on the five unrhymed tercets and the way syntax runs across their gaps would have secured full marks.

Grade III (Pass) answer (extract)

"The poet uses a lot of imagery in this poem. He uses the metaphor 'They board the windows first, then the heart' which shows that they are protecting themselves. There is personification when the almond tree is 'already practising' and repetition in 'bends and does not break, bends and does not break', which emphasises how strong the tree is and shows that the family are strong too. The poem is about a hurricane and how the family survive it. At the end the mother says they were lucky and the father takes the house apart again because the hurricane is over. This shows the family are relieved."

Mark: 10/25. Examiner commentary: Level 2, and instructively so. Every device the candidate names is correctly named — metaphor, personification, repetition — which is why the response is not lower. But naming is nearly all that happens: "emphasises how strong the tree is" is the only attempt at effect, and it is a generalisation that would fit any poem containing a tree. Nothing is said about the words themselves; "practising" and "politely", the two most loaded words in the poem, pass without comment, and the candidate does not notice that "bends and does not break" is split across a line break. The final sentence misreads the ending: the father's silence is set deliberately against the mother's speech, and "again" makes the closing action cyclical rather than relieved. Structure, named in the question, is not mentioned at all, which forfeits marks by itself. The route to improvement is not more devices but fewer, examined properly.

Question 2 — Sample Answer

Grade II (Merit) answer (extract)

"The dramatist establishes the two characters mainly through the way they speak. Neville speaks in long sentences and repeats 'still' three times — 'the pipe still here', 'the tank they promise still not here', 'you still standing in this line' — which shows his frustration that nothing has changed while he was away in the city. Miss Adina answers in short lines and does not argue with him. When she says 'The line is not the worst part' she makes him ask a question, so she controls the conversation even though she says less.

The stage directions are also important. At the start she is '(not letting go)' of the bucket, which shows she does not want to give up her independence, and later she hands it over 'at last', which shows she has accepted his help. The pause before she speaks about the road builds tension so the audience pays attention to what she says next.

The larger concern of the extract is that the village has been neglected for years and the tank was never built. This is a criticism of the government. The last line, 'Is the walking that spill it', warns Neville to be careful with the water."

Mark: 16/25. Examiner commentary: Secure Level 3. The reading of the dialogue is genuinely good: the tripled "still" is identified and explained, and the observation that Miss Adina controls the exchange by saying less is exactly the kind of point the top band is built from. The stage directions are handled competently, though "shows she has accepted his help" stops short — the delayed release is a transfer of authority, and the word "at last" is a direction to the performer about timing. Two things hold the answer at this level. The pause is said to "build tension" but the candidate does not analyse what the pause is filled with: Miss Adina looks along an empty road, and the emptiness is the point, since the road is empty in the same way the promise is. And the final line is read only literally. The response never registers that "Is the walking that spill it" is a proverb about Neville himself — that capability is not his difficulty, the distance is — and a candidate who unpacked that double meaning, together with the line about nobody in the line being surprised, would have moved comfortably into Level 4.

How Unit 1 is assessed

Paper 02 carries 75 marks and forms the major part of the Unit 1 external assessment, alongside Paper 01 and the Internal Assessment. Three questions are answered, one from each Module, so Drama, Poetry and Prose Fiction carry equal weight. Grades are reported Grade I – Grade VII, with Grade I the highest.

Three habits separate the top band. First, analyse the language, do not label it. Identifying a simile earns nothing; explaining why this comparison, in these words, in this position, produces this effect earns everything. The clearest symptom of a Level 2 script is a paragraph in which three devices are named and none is examined. Second, treat the text as made. Characters do not decide things; writers decide them. A candidate who writes that the poet places a line break after "the second count", or that the dramatist withholds the bucket for six lines, is already arguing about craft, which is where the marks are. Third, answer the question you were asked, especially where it names elements — a question that specifies imagery, repetition and structure has told you the shape of your essay, and candidates who silently omit one of the three routinely lose four or five marks they had the knowledge to earn.