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 1 mark each for: identifying the assassination in Sarajevo as the trigger (1); naming the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente (1); Russia mobilising to support Serbia (1)..." becomes one criterion per point, each worth its mark.
A counting rule stays as one criterion. "Any three of the following, 1 mark each" becomes a single criterion worth three marks, and the marker credits any three points from your list.
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.
Tip: write the scheme as text. A mark scheme that is only a picture (a photo or screenshot of a printed scheme) can't be split into criteria, so answers are marked without a breakdown and can come back with no marks at all.
Schemes with more than one method
Some questions can be answered more than one way. To show that a plant needs light, a student might do a starch test on a covered leaf, or count the bubbles a pondweed gives off under a lamp. Both deserve full marks.
Write each method as its own alternative in the scheme. Separate them with OR, "Alternatively", or a heading for each method, and make each one add up to the full marks, together with anything every method shares (a fair test, a conclusion).
Mindjoy works out which method the student used and marks the answer against that method only, plus the shared criteria. A student who took the pondweed route isn't marked down for skipping the starch test. So the Marking breakdown on these questions shows the rows for the student's own method and none from the other one, which simply didn't apply to this answer.
One point that accepts alternatives, such as "accept chlorophyll or green pigment", isn't a choice of methods. It stays one criterion.
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. On photos of handwritten work and PDF pages in New editor lessons, the ticks sit on the page itself. A mark that can't be pinned to one spot sits in the bottom-right corner of the photo or page.
If a student has crossed something out in a photo or scan, Mindjoy treats it as withdrawn: it earns no marks, even if you can still read it, and the marking credits what they wrote in its place. Crossed-out words are also left out of the transcript of their work.
A big cross or long strokes through a whole section or page count as crossed out too. If everything in a photo or PDF is crossed out, it isn't marked at all, and its File transcription says Crossed out, not marked.
The marking breakdown
The Marking breakdown sits in the marking panel beside the answer, above the feedback, and lists every criterion the answer was marked against. That's usually your whole scheme. On a scheme with more than one method, it's the method the student used plus any shared criteria (see Schemes with more than one method). The Mark scheme tab next to it shows the scheme as you wrote it. Each row of the breakdown 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 it was decided on, quoted.
The marker's reason for awarding or withholding it.
A criterion that was not met often has no quote at all, because there was nothing in the answer to credit, or quotes the nearest phrase that fell short. Either way, the reason tells you what was missing. That is usually the fastest way to see what a student missed.
The total is simply the sum of the criteria.
From tick to criterion and back
Click a tick in the answer and its row in the breakdown is highlighted, so you can see which criterion it was for. It works the other way round too: click a row and its tick lights up in the answer.
AI reasoning
Each criterion carries its own reason, so a long answer with a breakdown has no separate reasoning section. AI reasoning appears in the marking panel only when an answer was marked without a breakdown, to show how the marker arrived at the score overall.
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 photo they added was all crossed out, they see Crossed out, not marked under it once their marks are visible.
If a mark looks wrong
Read the quote and the reason 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 change a mark yourself with Adjust mark, or rewrite the feedback with Edit feedback. If you think the marking is genuinely wrong rather than a scheme problem, report it to us.