Annotating evidence — where Merit lives
The five things an annotation may do
- The standard lists them, and this list is what Merit is assessed against:
- identifying the relevance, and assessing the comparative usefulness, of the selected evidence in terms of the focusing questions
- identifying different perspectives
- cross-referencing specific information or ideas between sources to support the analysis
- assessing the reliability of the evidence and/or source
- identifying omissions or inaccuracies in the information
- Notice "comparative usefulness." Not just is this useful but is this more useful than that, and why.
- Notice "between sources." Cross-referencing is by definition an operation on two or more sources, so an annotation that never mentions another source cannot do this one.
What separates an Achieved annotation from a Merit one
- The Merit descriptor is precise: "making analytical and critical annotations that include assessment of the reliability of selected evidence."
- Three words are doing the work.
- Analytical — the annotation takes the evidence apart. This figure counts households, not people, so it understates the number affected.
- Critical — the annotation judges. This is the only account of the meeting, so nothing corroborates it.
- Reliability assessment — explicitly required, and required in the annotations rather than somewhere else in the folder.
- A descriptive annotation says what the source is. A newspaper report of the council meeting, 12 April 1954.
- An analytical and critical annotation says what it is worth. A newspaper report of the meeting, 12 April 1954. The only surviving account of the meeting: the minutes record decisions but not discussion. Reports speakers by name for the majority and as "several residents" for the objectors, so it supports my question about grounds for objection only weakly, and is more useful for who spoke than for what was said.
A form that produces Merit annotations
- Four elements, in order. Two or three sentences.
- What it is — type, author, date. One clause.
- What it gives me, against which focusing question — the relevance test.
- How it compares with another source — corroboration, contradiction, or a gap the other fills.
- What is wrong with it — reliability, omission, or inaccuracy.
- The fourth element is the one most often missing, and it is the one Merit names explicitly.
- Every annotation should be answerable to a focusing question. If you cannot say which question a source bears on, you have not established relevance, which is the first item on the standard's list.
Reliability at Level 3
- Reliability is not a verdict on the source. It is a judgement about a source relative to a use.
- Four questions that produce a real reliability assessment:
- Who made this, and were they in a position to know? Distance from the events matters.
- When was it made? A contemporary record and a recollection forty years later have different failure modes — the first is closer, the second has hindsight and may have been shaped by what happened next.
- Why was it made, and for whom? A source made to persuade, to justify, or to be read by a superior is shaped by that purpose.
- What does it leave out? The standard lists identifying omissions as its own annotation type.
- An unreliable source is not a useless source. A biased account is direct evidence of the position it argues for. Say which use you are judging it against.
Worked Example
Worked example
Note: the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme is an INVENTED case.
A student's focusing question is: Whose objections to the scheme were recorded between 1954 and 1961, and on what grounds were they set aside?
They have found a source and written this annotation:
What grade does this annotation support, and how should it be rewritten?
Answer:
Step 1 — check it against the standard's five annotation types.
- Relevance and comparative usefulness? It asserts usefulness — "this is useful" — and compares it to nothing. Half-met.
- Different perspectives? Not addressed.
- Cross-referencing between sources? No other source is mentioned. Not met.
- Reliability? "Quite reliable because it is a newspaper from the time." This is a claim, not an assessment — being contemporary is not on its own a reason for reliability, and the annotation does not ask what the paper was for or who it served.
- Omissions or inaccuracies? Not addressed.
One and a half of five, and the Merit-critical element — reliability assessment — is asserted rather than made. This supports Achieved.
Step 2 — diagnose the underlying problem.
Every sentence is about the source in isolation, and none is anchored to the focusing question. "Information about the objections" does not say which objections, whose, or on what grounds — the three things the question actually asks.
Step 3 — rewrite using the four-element form.
Step 4 — check what the rewrite achieved.
- All five annotation types present, including cross-referencing to two other sources and an explicit omission.
- Reliability assessed rather than asserted, with a mechanism — advertising relationship and editorial selection — rather than a label.
- The annotation splits the source's value between the two halves of the focusing question, which is comparative usefulness in the standard's sense.
- It identifies a gap the student must now fill, which will feed the evaluation later.
An annotation that never mentions another source cannot cross-reference, and an annotation that never says what a source lacks cannot identify omissions — two of the five listed activities, unavailable by construction.