There's a category of lost mark that has nothing to do with knowing the material.
A student reads a question, understands the topic, writes a good answer — to a slightly different question. The work is fine. The mark isn't. And when the paper comes back, it's almost impossible to explain, because everything on the page looks right.
In Alberta this isn't a vague problem. It's specific, it's documented, and Alberta Education publishes the list.
In mathematics diploma exams, certain words in written-response questions are printed in bold. That's not formatting. These are directing words, and students are expected to know their definitions — the full list sits in the back of each subject's Information Bulletin, published free on alberta.ca.
The bolding is Alberta telling students, in the middle of the exam, this word is the instruction.
Most students read straight past it.
Here's what they mean in plain language. These are paraphrased — the official wording is in the bulletin for each course, and it's worth reading the real thing once.
Determine — find the answer and show the route. The formulas, the procedure, the calculation. An answer with no work behind it isn't a determination, it's a guess that happened to be right.
Evaluate — find a numerical value. That's it. Narrower than it sounds in ordinary English, where "evaluate" means something closer to "weigh up."
Justify — take a position, then give the reasons and evidence that hold it up. Two moving parts. A justification with no stated position is a pile of facts; a position with no evidence is an opinion.
Compare — cover both things, and cover both similarities and differences. Students who list only the differences lose half the marks available and often don't know why.
Explain — make clear what isn't obvious. Give the cause or the reason.
Verify — show a statement is true for a particular case, usually by substituting in.
Prove — establish that it's true in general. Not the same job as verify, and swapping them costs marks.
Sketch — a drawing showing the key features. Not a work of art, but not a squiggle either.
Illustrate — give an example. The question will specify what form: a description, a sketch, a diagram.
Algebraically — using variables and symbols. If a question says algebraically determine, a graphing-calculator answer isn't the thing being asked for, no matter how right the number is.
This is the part I'd point a Grade 12 at. Each year the mathematics bulletins include commentary from the people who mark the exams, and the same notes keep coming back.
On determine: markers report that students give a solution and show no supporting work, or incomplete work. The number's there. The marks aren't.
On justify: markers note it requires stating a position and then supplying reasons or evidence that build an actual mathematical argument. Students give the second half and skip the first.
On algebraically determine: a complete algebraic process has to be shown.
And a related one worth knowing: where no rounding instruction is given, an exact-value answer is expected.
None of that is content knowledge. All of it is marks.
Mathematics publishes the tidiest list, so it makes the clearest example. The same failure shows up everywhere, wearing different clothes.
English 30-1. The Critical/Analytical assignment asks students to discuss ideas developed by the text creator in a text they have studied. There's a hard rule attached: a composition that only refers to the texts printed in the exam booklet, or makes no reference to studied literature, is assessed as Insufficient — which is a score of zero in both scoring categories. Not a low mark. Zero. A student can write beautifully for two hours and score nothing, because they answered a question that wasn't asked.
Sciences. The killers are the small words in the stem — not, except, least likely, most direct. A student who reads "which of the following is not" as "which of the following is" gets the question exactly backwards while understanding the biology perfectly.
Social Studies. Source analysis asks students to interpret a source and take a position on it. Summarising what the source says, without a position, is a common and expensive way to answer the wrong question.
Command words aren't only an exam problem, and this is the part parents can actually use.
The same misreading happens on Tuesday night homework, on unit tests, and in class when a teacher gives an instruction. A student who has to spend real effort just working out what's being asked is spending that effort on every question, all day. It looks like not paying attention. It usually isn't — it's fatigue from doing translation work nobody realises they're doing.
Ask them what one word means. Pick justify. Ask what it requires that explain doesn't. If they pause, you've found something.
Read the bulletin for their course. Alberta publishes an Information Bulletin per diploma subject, free, on alberta.ca. The directing words are in the back. It takes ten minutes and it's written for teachers, which means it tells you what the exam actually wants rather than what a study guide thinks it wants.
On the next returned test, find one question where the work was right and the mark wasn't. Read the question out loud together. Nine times out of ten the instruction word explains it.
Make them say the ask before they start. Out loud, in their own words. It's a two-second habit and it's the cheapest fifteen points in high school.
Every course has its own set. Evaluate in Math 30-1 does not mean what evaluate means in English 30-1, and neither one means what it means at the dinner table. The word doesn't transfer. Learning them is per-course work, and nobody schedules time for it because it doesn't look like studying.
It's about two hours of work across a semester. It's worth more than most of the twenty hours that go into re-reading notes.
Want to see whether this is what's costing your child marks? The five-minute assessment on this site scores question recognition separately from the other three steps, so you can see whether the problem is the reading or the work.
Sources: Alberta Education and Childcare Information Bulletins, 2025–2026, published at alberta.ca. Definitions above are paraphrased in plain language; the official definitions are in each subject's bulletin.