What this covers
- Deleting what you know is a retrieval test disguised as admin
- A mark scheme as text is searchable; as a PDF it is scrollable
- The condensed version is short enough to reread weekly
- Set it back as a PDF at 9pt for annotation by hand
A mark scheme is a reference document written for examiners. It is exhaustive by design, because its job is to cover every acceptable answer and every near miss across thousands of scripts.
That makes it the opposite of a revision document. Forty pages of alternatives, most of which you already know, with the handful you do not buried among them. Condensing it is a twenty-minute job that produces something you will actually reread.
Why the deleting is the point
The obvious way to make a summary is to write out the things you do not know. The better way is to start with everything and delete what you do.
Each deletion requires a judgement: do I actually know this, well enough that seeing it again is a waste of time? Answering that honestly is a retrieval attempt. You have to reach for the thing before you can decide whether you have it. So the process of condensing does the work that rereading the full document never would, and the document that results is a by-product.
Be honest about 'I know that'
The temptation is to delete anything that looks familiar. Familiarity is not knowledge - it is the same recognition trap that makes highlighting feel productive. The test is whether you could write the line out from nothing, not whether you recognise it.
The process
Twenty minutes per paper.
- Extract the mark scheme to text
PDF to Text, with page markers on, so you can find anything back in the original.
- Open it in a plain editor
Anything that edits text. Formatting is irrelevant and a word processor will slow you down.
- Delete downwards, once
Read each line. If you could produce it from nothing, delete it. Do not pause to rewrite anything - one pass, deleting only.
- Read what is left
It should be a small fraction of the original. This is your gap, stated in the examiner's own words.
- Rewrite it in your own
Second pass. Now rewrite each surviving line as you would say it. This is where the understanding happens.
- Set it as a PDF if you want to annotate
Text to PDF at 9pt gives you a dense printable sheet with space to write on.
The three tools
Typical results
- Source mark scheme
- 30 to 45 pages
- As extracted text
- 6,000 to 12,000 words
- After deleting what you know
- 800 to 2,000 words
- After rewriting
- 400 to 900 words
- Reread time
- Three to five minutes
- Time to produce
- About twenty minutes
Doing it across several years at once
Condensing one paper's mark scheme is useful. Condensing six and merging the results is where it becomes a revision document for the whole subject.
The overlap between years is itself informative: material that appears in every mark scheme is material the examiners consider core, and if it survived your deletion pass in more than one year, it is the first thing to fix.
What not to delete
Two categories are worth keeping even when you think you know them. The first is anything phrased as a rejection - 'do not accept', 'this alone is insufficient' - because those describe near misses, which are exactly the answers you are most likely to give.
The second is any line about method marks. Mark schemes are unusually explicit about what earns a mark for working even when the final answer is wrong, and that is free marks that people routinely leave behind by not writing down a step they did in their head.
What survives a good deletion pass
Roughly, and in this order of value.
| Keep | Why |
|---|---|
| Anything you could not produce from nothing | The actual gap |
| 'Do not accept' notes | Describes the near miss you are likely to make |
| Method mark allocations | Marks available for working you might not write down |
| Acceptable alternatives you did not know were acceptable | Removes a whole category of second-guessing |
| Anything that appears in several years | Core material the board keeps returning to |
Before you call it condensed
- One deletion pass, no rewriting during it
- 'Do not accept' lines kept regardless
- Method mark notes kept
- Second pass rewriting the survivors in your own words
- Short enough to reread in five minutes
- Stored with your other notes, not in the papers folder
Questions and answers
Why extract to text rather than working in the PDF?
Because you cannot delete from a PDF. The whole method depends on removing material, which needs an editable document. Text extraction also makes the mark scheme searchable, which is separately useful.
What if the mark scheme is a scan?
Then there is no text to extract, and this method does not work on it. You would have to retype the relevant parts, which is slow enough that condensing a different year's scheme is usually the better use of the time.
How often should I reread the condensed version?
Weekly is about right, and it takes five minutes. Delete anything from it that you have since learned - the document should shrink over a revision period, which is a pleasant and fairly reliable measure of progress.
Does the extracted text keep the question numbers?
Usually, because they are part of the text layer. With page markers on, you can also find any line back in the original PDF, which matters when the mark scheme refers to a diagram.
