Step marking in Class 12 Accountancy.

Accountancy is not marked by the answer. It is marked by the line. A six-mark question is typically half a mark a posting, or a mark an entry, and a student who gets the structure right and one figure wrong loses that figure’s half mark rather than the question. It is the subject where step marking matters most, because almost nothing in it is a single final number.

By Anant Khemka · 8 October 2026

Where the marks sit

From CBSE’s own published marking schemes, the shape is consistent across years:

The consequence is worth saying plainly to a student: a missing entry costs one entry. It does not cost the question. Attempting an incomplete answer is almost always worth more than leaving it.

Working notes: there is no single rule, and that surprises people

This is the question teachers ask most, and the honest answer is that CBSE does not answer it once. The schemes decide it question by question, and they go both ways in the same paper.

• On many questions the note reads plainly: “No marks for working notes.” The marks are all in the account or the statement.
• On others the working carries its own mark — a goodwill adjustment where the sacrifice calculation is worth one of three, or a cash flow statement where the named working is worth one of six.

What is consistent is the tolerance. Where a working is marked, the schemes accept any correct presentation of it — one reads “Working notes in any form to be given full credit” — and where it is not marked, a correct final account earns full marks without it. So: show the working, because sometimes it pays and it never costs; but do not expect it to rescue a wrong account.

One error, charged once

Accountancy is the subject where a single wrong figure travels furthest. A mistake in the journal reaches the ledger, the trial balance and the balance sheet, and a strict marker could in principle deduct at every stop.

CBSE’s standing instruction to examiners, carried unchanged across its schemes for more than a decade, forbids exactly that: “No marks to be deducted for the cumulative effect of an error. It should be penalized only once.”

Be precise about what that does and does not say. It does not say the wrong figure is then treated as correct everywhere downstream, and CBSE does not publish a mark-by-mark follow-through rule the way some international boards do. It says the examiner may not charge you twice for the same mistake. In practice that is the difference between losing half a mark and losing a question — the same principle English schemes call error carried forward.

The narration rule that quietly disappeared

Through at least March 2020, CBSE’s general instructions carried a specific penalty: “Deductions up to 25% of the marks must be made if the student has not drawn formats of the Journal and Ledger and has not given the narrations.” Note the and — it applied when both were missing.

That clause is not present in the recent board marking schemes we could read, and no separate narration mark appears in their answer keys either, though the printed model answers still show narrations throughout. We cannot tell you whether it was withdrawn deliberately or moved into the spot-evaluation guidelines CBSE keeps separately and does not publish.

So the practical advice has not changed — write the narration — but a teacher marking an internal test should know the published basis for deducting it is no longer visible. The same instructions were always explicit that “no marks are to be deducted or awarded for writing / not writing ‘TO and BY’”, which is still worth telling a class that has been drilled otherwise.

Alternative treatments are credited by name

Accountancy has genuine judgement calls, and the schemes handle them better than you might expect. Where a treatment is contestable — a short-term provision read as tax rather than as proposed dividend, two entries combined into one — the scheme names the alternative and prints the figures it leads to, so the examiner can mark it right rather than mark it down. That is more generous than most subjects and worth knowing before you argue with a mark.

Common questions

Do I lose marks if my working notes are wrong but the account is right?

Generally no, where the working is not itself marked — the schemes repeatedly say a correct final account gets full credit regardless. Where the working is marked, you lose that working’s mark and keep the account’s. What you should not assume is the reverse: correct working under a wrong account does not earn the account’s marks.

If I get one figure wrong at the start, do I lose everything after it?

You should not. CBSE instructs examiners not to deduct for the cumulative effect of an error and to penalise it once. In a subject where a journal figure walks into three later statements, that single instruction is the most valuable line in the document.

Is narration still compulsory?

Write it. The explicit 25% penalty for missing both format and narration was in CBSE’s instructions through at least 2020 and is absent from the recent schemes we could read, but model answers still carry narrations and no scheme says they are optional. This is not a risk worth taking to save a line.

Does the Balance Sheet have to be in Schedule III order?

The schemes mark classification item by item — half a mark for the right heading and sub-heading — rather than penalising the overall order as a separate offence. In effect, a misplaced item loses its own half mark. We found no instruction that makes layout a penalty in its own right.