Marking terms, explained.
Most of the vocabulary around checking a paper is used loosely, including by people who mark for a living. These are the terms that change what a student actually scores, with what each one means and where the boards do not agree.
One caveat before the list. Rules differ by board and they change. Where a term has a specific procedure attached — re-evaluation windows, grace-mark policy, moderation — treat what follows as the meaning of the word, not as your board's current rule, and check the circular for the year you are sitting.
What the marks are made of
Marking scheme
The instruction set an examiner marks against: what each question is worth, how that total splits across the parts of an answer, and what a student has to have written to collect each split. It is not a model answer, which is the thing people usually picture and the thing nobody has time to write. What a marking scheme contains, in full.
Answer key
The correct answers, without the mark distribution. A key tells you whether a student was right. A scheme tells you what to pay them for being partly right. The difference only shows up on the answers that are not clean — which, on a real paper, is most of them.
Step marking
Awarding marks for the stages of an answer rather than for the final result. A three-mark numerical is typically a mark for the method, a mark for correct substitution and a mark for the answer. A student who sets it up correctly and arrives at the wrong number has still earned two of the three. How the steps divide is set by the question, not by a rule of thumb, which is why it is worth looking at a real one: step marking in Class 12 Physics, step marking in Class 10 Maths, and step marking in Class 12 Accountancy.
Error carried forward
When a student makes an error early in a multi-step answer and carries that wrong value correctly through the remaining steps, those later steps still earn their marks. The student is penalised once, for the mistake they made, and not repeatedly for its consequences. It does not apply to a wrong method, which is a different failure. Error carried forward, worked through.
Follow-through marks
The same convention under a different name, used chiefly in IB and Cambridge schemes. If you see ECF in one scheme and ft in another, they are asking for the same thing.
What happens to the marks afterwards
Moderation
Adjusting marks after checking so that different examiners, or different centres, are brought onto a comparable standard. It is a correction for the marker, not for the student — the premise is that two examiners given the same script will not award the same total, which is well established and is the reason the step is thought necessary at all.
Normalisation
Often confused with moderation and not the same thing. Normalisation adjusts across different question papers or sessions of the same examination, so that a candidate who sat a harder shift is not disadvantaged. It belongs to multi-session entrance tests rather than to school marking.
Grace marks
Marks added at the board's discretion, usually to carry a candidate over a pass threshold or to compensate for a defective question. The amount, the subjects it can be applied to and whether it appears on the marksheet are all board-specific and are revised often.
Internal assessment
The portion of a subject's marks awarded by the school rather than by the board examination — practicals, projects, periodic tests. It is set by the board's scheme of studies for that subject, and it is the part of a student's total that the institution itself controls.
What a student can ask for afterwards
Verification of marks
A clerical recheck. Somebody confirms that every question was marked, that nothing was left unmarked, and that the totals were added correctly. Nobody re-reads the answers or re-forms a judgement about them.
Photocopy of the answer sheet
Obtaining a scanned or photocopied image of the evaluated script, so the candidate can see what was written and what was awarded. It is ordinarily the step between verification and re-evaluation, and in several boards you cannot apply for re-evaluation without it.
Re-evaluation
An actual re-marking of specified answers against the marking scheme by a different examiner. This is the only one of the three that can change a judgement rather than an arithmetic slip, and it is usually the narrowest — limited to named questions, a short window, and a fee per question.
Compartment
The provision for a candidate who has failed a limited number of subjects to clear them in a separate later examination rather than repeat the year. How many subjects qualify, and whether the original marks stand, vary by board.
Best of five
Computing a percentage from a candidate's five best-scoring subjects rather than from all subjects taken. It is a rule about how a percentage is reported, not about how any paper is marked, and it is not universal — several boards do not operate it at all.
Who does the checking
Spot evaluation
Centralised marking, where examiners are called to a designated centre and mark under supervision within a fixed window, rather than taking scripts home. It exists to make marking observable and to keep it to a timetable.
Head examiner
The examiner responsible for a group of assistant examiners: briefing them on the scheme, sampling their marked scripts, and correcting drift before it reaches students. Most of what makes marking consistent across a board happens at this level rather than at the individual examiner's desk. How boards keep marking consistent sets out what that actually involves.
On-screen marking
Marking a scanned image of the answer sheet on a screen instead of the physical script. The marking rules do not change; what changes is that the examiner cannot hold the paper, flip between pages freely, or judge a faint pencil mark by tilting it to the light. CBSE moved Class 12 to on-screen marking in February 2026.
Why the vocabulary matters more than it sounds
Nearly all of these terms describe a decision about a partly-correct answer. A clean right answer and a blank need no vocabulary at all. Everything above exists because real scripts sit in between, and because what happens to those scripts is where the difference between two markers — or two centres — actually shows up. A hundred and eleven things that make a handwritten paper hard to mark is the longer version of that argument, and copy checking rules for teachers sets out which of those decisions a board actually makes for you.
See these applied to one of your own papers.
Send a test your students have already written, with your marks on it. Compare where the steps were awarded. The first paper is free.