Marking Shorthand

Using a short­hand such as this can help teach­ers pro­vide more detailed and spe­cific feed­back to you on your assign­ments –which, in turn, helps you to improve. The fol­low­ing is a list of com­mon mark­ing short­hand expres­sions that I use when mark­ing your work:

✓ = Good point, or well done. How­ever by ‘good point’ I don’t mean that every check mark means a mark or that the num­ber of check marks should be the same as the mark you got (i.e. out of 10).

? = Con­fus­ing, or unclear. This can be used with other nota­tions (i.e. “?, exp” means “This is unclear, please explain.”)

.’. = Means “therefore”

‘.’ = Means “because”

(d.) = define this, or “def­i­n­i­tion required”

Ana = analy­sis (as in, “this is evi­dence of analysis”)

C.P. = Ceteris Paribus, every­thing else remain­ing equal. If I write this, I am indi­cat­ing that your analy­sis is cor­rect, but only if every­thing else remains equal. You should be indi­cat­ing this yourself.

CON = Con­tra­dic­tion. Some­thing you have writ­ten con­tra­dicts some­thing else you have writ­ten, or per­haps what is shown in your dia­gram or the arti­cle you are discussing.

CLASPP = This is for my eco­nom­ics stu­dents. Don’t for­get to eval­u­ate using CLASPP (Read this on eval­u­a­tion in economics)

Des. = Descrip­tive. This is often not a good thing. Gen­er­ally, in Eco­nom­ics and Busi­ness we are try­ing to either ana­lyze or eval­u­ate. So when you sim­ply describe the sit­u­a­tion you aren’t earn­ing marks.

DEED = “Make sure you are doing the DEED”

Dev’p = (Or Dev). Please develop your answer, to ensure you have clearly and fully answered the question.

Dia = please pro­vide a dia­gram for this.

ECF = Error car­ried for­ward. I will not penal­ize you twice for a wrong calculation.

EXP = Excel­lent point! Try to get these. Make inter­est­ing, insight­ful, orig­i­nal points.

EE = Effec­tive evaluation.

Ex = Please pro­vide an example

Exp = Explain this, or expand on what you’ve men­tioned here

FS = Please write in full sentences.

GDIG = Good diagram

GEN = I may have marked this gen­er­ously. Even though I feel this is a fair grade, another teacher mark­ing this may have marked it lower.  If you read this you should strengthen the work in your next attempt in order to be sure of achiev­ing the same grade.

GEXA = Good example

GEXP = Good explanation

GM = Gram­mar mistake

GUT = Good use of text

IU = Inap­pro­pri­ate use. For exam­ple, you might be using the wrong term to explain a sit­u­a­tion, or the wrong dia­gram to ana­lyze a situation.

Imp = Impre­cise, or basi­cally cor­rect, but some errors

LD = Lacks depth

NExa = No exam­ple used. You should always be using exam­ples to explain things. (See RLE)

ND = You have not fully answered this question

NM = No marks were granted for this (i.e. for this para­graph), or that putting this in was not necessary

NN = Not nec­es­sar­ily. If you have made a state­ment which is pos­si­bly, but not nec­es­sar­ily true.

PD = Poor diagram

ROS — Run-on-Sentence

Sp = Spelling mistake

Repeat = Rep­e­ti­tion. If you are doing this you are not get­ting the most marks you can out of your words.

RLE = Effec­tively use a Real Life Exam­ple to help you answer the ques­tion. For exam­ple, you need to do this in IB Eco­nom­ics Paper 1 (15 mark part) and in Paper 2 to get in the top mark band.

RTQ = Refer to the ques­tion (or “please read the ques­tion”), or ‘you aren’t answer­ing the ques­tion here’. Some teach­ers might write NAQ, mean­ing you have “Not answered [the] question”

Sc = Please cite your sources (as per MLA style). Read: Cit­ing Sources Made Easy

SFL — This is short for SFLWPPC (Seri­ously Fan­tas­tic Lead­ers Will Profit Peo­ple Con­sis­tently) the mnemonic we use to remem­ber the dif­fer­ent types of eval­u­a­tion in Business.

SYW = Show your work (i.e. in calculations)

UC = Unsup­ported Con­clu­sion. I will write this when you are mak­ing a point in your con­clu­sion which is not sup­ported by your analy­sis. Of course, the pur­pose of your analy­sis is to guide you to think in a struc­tured, pro­fes­sional way (as I explain here). When you make con­clu­sions with­out using course frame­works, you aren’t using the skills the course has taught you and there­fore aren’t earn­ing marks.

WC = Please pro­vide your word count, or “you have gone over the word count limit”

X = You are mis­taken here. Incor­rect point.

The­ory of Knowl­edge Shorthand

GEXA = Good example

CPV = Clear per­sonal voice

GIN = Good insight

GA = Good analysis

CTH = Clear thesis

GKI = Good KI

DNE = Does not follow

NTH = No thesis

? = Unclear

HEX = Hypo­thet­i­cal example

DES = Descriptive

REF = Ref­er­ence needed

GEN = Generalisation