When Mindjoy marks a long answer, it does not just produce a number. It splits your mark scheme into its separate criteria, decides each one on its own, and shows you the exact words in the student's answer that earned each mark.
This article is about what you see when you open a marked long answer.
Your mark scheme becomes a list of criteria
Write your mark scheme as you always have. Before the first answer is marked, Mindjoy reads it once and splits it into the separate things it is asking for, with the marks you allocated to each.
A scheme like "Award marks for: mentioning CO₂ and H₂O as reactants (1), glucose and O₂ as products (1), chloroplasts as the location (1), and role of light energy (1)" becomes four criteria worth one mark each.
Every student in the class is then marked against that same list, which is what makes the marking consistent from the first script to the last. Edit the scheme and it is split again.
Ticks land on the work
Open a student's answer and you will see a tick at the end of each phrase that earned a mark, the way you would annotate a script by hand. One tick, one mark.
The marking breakdown
Under the feedback, Marking breakdown lists every criterion in your scheme. Each row shows:
A green tick if the mark was awarded, a grey cross if it was not.
The marks for that criterion.
The criterion itself, in your own words from the scheme.
The phrase from the student's answer that earned it, quoted.
A criterion that was not met shows no quote, because there was nothing in the answer to credit. That is usually the fastest way to see what a student missed.
The total is simply the sum of the criteria.
AI reasoning
Above the breakdown, AI reasoning expands to show how the marker arrived at the score overall. Between the reasoning and the quotes, you can usually tell at a glance whether an answer was misread or whether the mark scheme needs tightening.
What students see
Students see their marks and their feedback. They do not see the criteria, the quotes, the ticks or the reasoning. Those are for you.
If a mark looks wrong
Read the quote first. If the marker credited the wrong phrase, or credited nothing where you would have given a mark, that usually points at the scheme rather than the answer, and tightening the wording fixes it for the whole class. See How to update mark schemes and remark submissions.
You can always override a mark or rewrite the feedback yourself with Edit feedback. If you think the marking is genuinely wrong rather than a scheme problem, report it to us.