Misconceptions report
Marks tell you how your class did. The Misconceptions tab tells you why. It groups the wrong answers and partial answers across your class into common patterns, so you can see which mistakes are widespread — and target your re-teaching accordingly.
Getting there
Open any assessment with marked submissions and click the Misconceptions tab. (Hidden until you have at least one marked submission.)
What you’ll see
The page is laid out as a series of cards, each one a category of misconception. Each card shows:
- A short title — e.g. “Confused photosynthesis and respiration” or “Used the wrong formula for area”
- The questions it appears on
- The students who showed this pattern
- A short explanation of what the misconception is and how it shows up
Use the cards to plan a re-teach, a follow-up question, or a class discussion.
How Marking.ai groups misconceptions
Marking.ai looks across every wrong or partial answer in the assessment and clusters similar mistakes together. Two students writing different words but making the same underlying error end up in the same group.
This isn’t deterministic — it’s a pattern Marking.ai surfaces, not a definitive taxonomy. Use the groups as a starting point, then dig into individual submissions to confirm.
From misconception to action
From each card you can:
- Click a student to jump to their submission
- Click a question to see the question-level analysis
- Use the data to write a follow-up question, plan a starter task, or pull a small group aside
What if I don’t see any misconceptions?
A couple of reasons this can happen:
- You haven’t marked many submissions yet — the patterns need a few students before they show up.
- Your class genuinely did well across the board, with no clustering of errors.
- The assessment was very short — not much variation to spot.
Need help?
Click the chat icon in the app or email connect@marking.ai.
FAQs
How does the AI decide what counts as a misconception?
It looks for repeated patterns in the answers that lost marks — wrong reasoning, partial answers, confused concepts — and groups similar instances together. It’s a heuristic, not a guarantee.
Can I edit the misconception cards?
Not directly. If a card is wrong or misleading, the underlying student submissions are the source of truth — review those, edit their feedback if needed, and the patterns adjust.
Does the Misconceptions tab include the marking guide?
No — it’s focused on what students did, not on what they should have done. For the mark scheme view, open any question in the Edit Q dialog. See Editing extracted questions.