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Dr Mandar Marathe

There are no marks for showing your working

📅 Wed 3 December 2025 at 07:00 GMT

Mandar Marathe Mandar Marathe 📁 Daily, Pedagogy, Personal Effectiveness

- A new take on an old catchphrase

“Always show your working”

This is a mantra I remember from maths and science lessons at school.

Whenever the task had several methodological steps, exam boards drilled into us, “there are marks for showing your working.” Even if you got the final calculation wrong, you’d still get marks for demonstrating the correct preceding steps.

This mindset was baked into my generation by the UK’s education system of the early 1990s onwards. When GCSEs replaced O-levels in 1988, the vision was to move away from assessment by an all-or-nothing final exam, towards a more inclusive assessment system that identified more reward-worthy aspects of a student’s ability.

This led to continuous assessment (remember: coursework!) And – marks for showing your working, not only for the correct final answer. So far, so… enlightened, pedagogically.

But as adults, we subconsciously still apply this value judgement in real life.

Even if our final answer is wrong, we hope to get some marks for showing our working

When your deadline is overdue and you feel the need to explain all the steps you’ve taken. When you don’t have precisely what a client needs, but you hope that explanations will win favour, and you could sell what you do have.

In fact, whenever we make excuses for the “wrong answer” – isn’t it a form of showing your working?

What started as a modernising educational philosophy in the 1980s became a generation that loves to tolerate excuses and explanations for ourselves – to “always show our working” – rather than single-mindedly and relentlessly focusing on results and outcomes.

Culturally, we have elevated the effort to the same status as the result, leaving the result poorer off.

And yet, as I got older, I realise that in life, there are often no marks for showing your working. The person judging you doesn’t want to know why your answer is wrong.

Well-intentioned effort alone doesn’t put food on the table. A project started with great enthusiasm and passion is not a project delivered. Anyone can talk big dreams; the winner is the one who can close the deal.

The exam boards lied to us!

But wait, I’m not advocating we stop “showing our working” completely. Because I also see the other extreme – people who are incapable of articulating their thought process or underlying assumptions, and this causes different problems.

Ask them why they did something the way they did, and they can’t explain it. “It’s the way we always do it.” Or “I had a gut feeling about it.” “It made sense at the time.” They can’t show their working.

Heuristic burnout

In Medicine, I call it heuristic burnout – when your heuristics (mental shortcuts) of what to do in a situation are so burnt-in that you forget how these heuristics were formed, and the assumptions they were formulated upon. Heuristic burnout is a pandemic in my specialty, Emergency Medicine.

The D-dimer done for pleuritic chest pain without a risk stratification. Most CT angiograms for “?aortic dissection”. How “It’s never lupus” turned into “It’s never cauda equina.”

The problem comes when you need to think beyond the heuristic but you struggle. The “normal D-dimer, normal CTPA, but still crashing” situation. Knowing how we ended up where we are can be the key to untangling the mess we’re in!

Where we are today is predicated on the decisions and assumptions we made yesterday… and what were they, exactly? And from a leadership perspective – what value do you add as an educator, mentor or role model if you are unable to explain your thought process?

So, where do we go from here?

We need a middle path.

On one extreme, constantly explaining ourselves reinforces our in-grained misconception that the process matters to the client as much as it does to us.

At the other extreme, heuristic burnout stops us being skilled in showing our working, even when showing the working would be immediately diagnostic.

There are times when we need to let the results speak for themselves. There are other times when the working becomes diagnostic. This breadth of evaluation is what the exam boards were aiming for when they wanted us to show our working!

Today, we need to ingest and operationalise the philosophy underlying the exam rubrics, to skilfully know, in a nuanced way, when each type of evaluation is most appropriate.

So, I’ve updated the exam board’s rubrics. “There are no marks for showing your working. But please – for everyone’s sake – you must clearly document your working in the space provided.”

And that’s A Deeper Thought.

Mandar Marathe

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– Mandar

🔖 #education #value #ADeeperThought #Day13

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