Every task page carries its success criteria, published before you start. Most people read them once, on the day the task is handed out, and never again — and then hand in work that misses two rows they could have fixed in twenty minutes. This page is the twenty minutes.
We do it together the first time, out loud, on a report nobody in the room has to defend — so that the move is not new to you on the day it is your own work being judged.
The routine
- Open the task page and put the criteria beside your work.
- Go row by row. For each one write yes, not yet, or partly — and one sentence of evidence: the paragraph, the graph, the number a reader would land on. “Yes” with nothing beside it is a wish.
- Find your weakest row. Not the easiest to fix — the weakest.
- Write one sentence saying what you will change.
- Change it, in the time that is left. This is why a self-check is never the last thing you do before handing something in — sometimes it is the period before, sometimes it is the first ten minutes of a period whose rest is yours to fix things in. A judgement you have no time to act on is only a worry.
Steps 2 and 3 are the whole exercise. Naming your weakest row honestly is harder than the fixing, because it means saying out loud the thing you were hoping nobody would look at.
One row, judged honestly
From Lab Reports: “Limits named honestly — the step that could have misled you, roughly how much it could have moved the result, and one change that would actually reduce it.”
Partly. I wrote that the lamp warmed the water. I did not say by how much, and I measured it — 3 °C at the closest distance. I also did not say what I would change. Weakest row. Change: put the 3 °C in, say that it could account for part of the difference at 10 cm, and add that a heat shield between lamp and beaker would separate light from heat. Ten minutes.
That entry is worth more than “looks fine” written against all seven rows, and it took less time to write.
Where this fits
Your judgement of your own work is not part of your mark, and neither is a classmate’s — see How Marks Work. That is deliberate, and it cuts both ways: nothing you write here can cost you anything, which is exactly what makes it worth writing honestly.
What it changes is the work. A self-check that leads to one fix is the cheapest improvement available in this course, and by January it is something you do without being asked.
Read your judgement out loud to the person beside you
It catches the rows where you were being generous. You will usually hear it yourself before they say anything — which is the point, and is also why nothing they say to you goes anywhere near either of your marks.