Command Words: The One Word in Every IGCSE and A-Level Question That Decides the Marks

Here is something that happens in exam halls across the UAE every single session. A student reads a question, recognises the topic, feels a wave of relief, and writes down everything they know about it. Three neat paragraphs. Then the paper comes back and the six-mark question scored two.

The student is upset, and understandably so. They knew the material. They wrote a lot. So where did the marks go?

Almost always, the answer is a single word near the start of the question that the student read straight past. Describe. Explain. Compare. Evaluate. State. These are called command words, and they are the exam telling you, in plain language, exactly what kind of answer will earn the marks. Miss the command word and you can write a page of correct facts and still lose most of the marks, because you answered a question the examiner did not ask.

As examiners, this is the single most common way we see capable students throw marks away. It is also one of the more fixable problems a student can have. You do not need to learn more content. You need to learn to read six or seven words properly.

Every exam question is really two parts joined together. There is the topic, which is what the question is about, and there is the command word, which is what the question wants you to do with that topic. Through targeted IGCSE and A-Level tutoring, students learn to decode both instantly before putting pen to paper.

Take a question like: "Explain why a plant wilts when it is not watered." The topic is plant water loss. The command word is explain. A student who knows about osmosis and turgor pressure has the topic covered. But if they only describe what happens, the leaves droop, the stem bends, they have not explained why, and the marks for reasoning are gone.

The mark scheme is built around the command word, not around how much you know. For an explain question, the marks are sitting behind the words because and therefore and this causes. For a describe question, they are sitting behind what you observe. Same topic, completely different answer, and the command word is the only thing telling you which one to give. Exam boards like Cambridge International publish an official command words list to help students and teachers align with these exact mark-scheme requirements.

Some command words are close cousins, and the small difference between them is exactly where students slip. These are the ones we see cost the most marks, session after session.

This is the big one, and it appears in almost every subject. Describe asks for what happens. Explain asks for why it happens. They look similar and they are not.

A quick test your child can use in the hall: if they can answer without ever writing the word because, the question was probably describe. If the answer only makes sense with a because in it, the question was explain and every sentence should be building toward that reason.

State and give are asking for a short, direct answer. A fact, a name, a number. No sentence needed, no reasoning, no padding. Students often over-write these, spending three minutes and a paragraph on a question that wanted four words. That wastes time they will need later in the paper. If the command word is state, one line is the correct length.

Compare is a trap for a specific reason. It asks what is alike and what is different about two things. Cambridge's own wording is “similarities and/or differences”, but the answers that score well link the two in one sentence rather than describing each thing separately.

Evaluate and discuss appear more at A-Level and carry the most marks per question, but they are not quite the same. Evaluate asks your child to weigh something up and reach a judgement. Discuss asks for a structured, in-depth look at the issue from more than one side, and many A-Level mark schemes still reward a conclusion. In both, a student who argues only one side has answered half the question.

Parents rarely see a mark scheme, so this part is worth understanding. When we mark, we are not rewarding effort or the amount written. We are matching what the student wrote against a list of specific points the command word requires.

On an explain question worth four marks, the scheme usually lists four reasoning points. A student earns a mark each time they hit one, and writing three descriptive sentences that never reach a reason earns nothing, no matter how neat or long they are. This is why a student can fill the space, feel they did well, and still score low. They wrote plenty. They just did not write the type of thing the command word was pointing at.

It also explains a comment parents hear a lot: "my child understands it, they just do not show it in exams." Often the understanding is genuinely there. What is missing is the habit of aiming the answer at the command word so the understanding actually lands on the mark scheme. We wrote about that gap more fully in Your Child Understands Physics. So Why Are the Marks Still Low?, and command words are one of the biggest reasons it happens. Building this habit into timed practice is a large part of how we approach exam preparation with a 1-to-1 tutor. To see which command words cost marks in a real exam series, read the examiner report for that paper. Our guide on how to read an examiner report shows where to find one.

The fix is small. Before writing a single word of an answer, your child does three things.

Together, that takes about five seconds per question. It feels too small to matter, but when the content is already there, aiming it is often the part that was missing.

You do not need to know the subject to help with this. Within one exam board, command words mean the same across biology, history and economics, so you can drill them without understanding the topic at all.

• Take any past paper: Go through it together and just circle the command word in every question. Do not answer them. The circling is the skill.
• Ask what each command word wants: Ask your child what each command word wants before they attempt the answer. If they can say "describe wants what happens," they are already ahead of most of the hall.
• Verify against the mark scheme: When they mark their own work against the mark scheme, ask one question: did the answer match the command word? Lost marks are very often a command-word mismatch, not a knowledge gap.

If you have not started working with past papers yet, our guide to why past papers are the final step, not the first, explains how to sequence them so command-word practice fits in at the right stage. In calculation questions, pairing command word vigilance with a routine to catch silly mistakes in maths exams protects easy marks from slipping away.

Keep this near your child's desk. It covers the command words that appear most often across IGCSE and A-Level papers.

Command words are the quietest reason capable students underperform, and one of the easiest to fix. There is no new content to learn. There is just a word in every question that has been telling the student what to do all along, and a habit of reading it before the pen moves.

A student who circles the command word, knows what it demands, and aims every sentence at it, will pull marks out of knowledge they already had. It is often one of the quicker things to change, and it starts with a past paper and a pen this evening, not more revision.

If your child is writing plenty and scoring less than they should, sit with their last marked paper and check one thing: did each answer do what the command word asked?