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What a grade 4, 6 and 8 answer looks like
The same moment in an essay, written at three grades. These are our own model answers, written for the AQA specification, with notes on what each one does and what the next one adds.
On Paper 1 of AQA’s GCSE English Literature, the question on A Christmas Carol prints an extract from the novella. Your child writes about the extract and then about the novella as a whole, from memory, because the exam is closed book. The essay is marked out of 30.
The answers below are ours, not AQA’s. We wrote them for the AQA specification, at grades 4, 6 and 8–9, for our A Christmas Carol model answer pack. An examiner does not give an essay a grade. They place it in one of six levels and give it a mark. Grades come later: once all the papers have been marked, AQA’s senior examiners set that year’s grade boundaries.
The question
“Starting with this extract, explore how Dickens presents the importance of family in A Christmas Carol.”
The question is ours too. The extract comes from Stave 3. The Ghost of Christmas Present has taken Scrooge to watch the Cratchits at the end of their Christmas dinner: the family round the fire, Bob’s toast, Tiny Tim, and Scrooge asking whether Tim will live.
How each answer begins
“In A Christmas Carol, Dickens shows that family is very important.”
That is the grade 4 answer, and it is true, but it would fit almost any essay on the topic.
“Dickens presents family as the most precious thing a person can have, worth far more than money.”
The grade 6 answer takes a position on family and money that the rest of the essay can test.
“Dickens presents the family as the moral centre of A Christmas Carol: the place where people learn to value each other above money, and a model for the society he wants his readers to build.”
The grade 8–9 answer opens with an argument, often called a thesis, and every paragraph after it follows that line.
One moment, three ways
In the extract the family drink from two tumblers and a cup with no handle, which Dickens says did the job as well as golden goblets. All three answers use this moment.
Grade 4
“They only have ‘Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle’, which shows they are poor. However, Dickens says the cups worked ‘as well as golden goblets would have done’. This shows that the family do not need money to be happy because they have each other.”
The quotations are short and exact, and each one is built into a sentence. The word “However” sets poverty against happiness, so the paragraph argues a point. What it does not do yet is explain how Dickens’s words create that effect.
Grade 6
“Their ‘family display of glass’ is only ‘Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle’, yet Dickens says these held the drink ‘as well as golden goblets would have done’. The contrast between a cup with no handle and ‘golden goblets’ shows that love gives ordinary things their value. Dickens’s middle-class readers might have pitied the Cratchits, but he wants them to admire them.”
This names the method, a contrast, and says what it shows. It also thinks about Dickens’s middle-class readers and what he wanted them to feel, which is context doing a job inside the argument.
Grade 8–9
“The grand noun ‘display’ is gently comic, but the comparison that follows, ‘as well as golden goblets would have done’, carries the moral. Gold belongs to Scrooge’s world: Belle tells him that ‘Another idol has displaced me’, and the idol is ‘A golden one’. A handleless cup, shared, outweighs gold because love fills it.”
One word, “display”, is read for its tone. The golden goblets are linked to Belle in Stave 2, so a detail in the extract becomes part of a pattern across the novella. The last sentence states the idea in plain words. Later the same answer weighs another reading: “Some readers find the Cratchits too idealised to be believable, but the idealisation serves Dickens’s purpose.”
What moves an answer up
- From the extract to the whole novella. The grade 4 answer stays mostly in the extract. The grade 6 answer uses quotations from several staves, and the grade 8–9 answer from all five.
- From what to how: naming a method and explaining what it does to the reader.
- Context that explains why Dickens wrote as he did, inside the paragraph it supports. Our upgrade task for this question asks for exactly that: rewrite the sentence about context to explain why Dickens wanted readers to care about poor families, then move it into that paragraph.
- One argument from the first sentence to the last.
- Weighing up a different reading of the text, then answering it.
Using this at home
Read the three passages about the goblets with your child and ask what changes from one to the next, then which one is closest to their own writing now. In our packs we give a rough guide: a grade 4 answer usually sits in Level 3, “Explained, structured comments”, a grade 6 answer in Level 4, “Clear understanding”, and a grade 8–9 answer in Level 6, “Convincing, critical analysis and exploration”. These are AQA’s level headings. The full answers, with numbered notes and tasks for moving up, are in the model answer pack in our revision packs.
For your child, the student guides on the What–How–Why paragraph and starting with a thesis cover the same moves.
Sources
- AQA, GCSE English Literature 8702 specification (version 1.3, 2022)
- AQA, Mark scheme: GCSE English Literature Paper 1, June 2023
- AQA, Grade boundaries
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Project Gutenberg