Narrate an incident from your own experience when you expected to do very well, but for some reason were unable to do so. Explain what happened and why it happened. What lesson did you learn from it?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 380 words)

THE QUIZ I WAS GOING TO WIN

I have never been as certain of anything as I was of winning the inter-house quiz in Class Nine, and I have never been as thoroughly beaten.

There were four rounds and I had prepared for three of them. History, geography and current affairs I had worked through for six weeks, making cards, testing myself on the bus, reading the newspaper with a pen. The fourth round was sport, and I had decided in November — quite deliberately, as a strategy — not to prepare it at all, on the grounds that there was only so much time and sport was worth the same twenty marks as anything else.

I was leading after two rounds. I remember looking at the scoreboard during the interval and thinking, with great calm, that it was finished.

The sport round had twelve questions. I answered two.

What made it worse was that they were not difficult questions. They were the kind of thing anybody who had glanced at a back page in two years would have known — who captained a team, where a tournament was held. Rehan, who finished third overall and who I had privately considered no threat whatever, answered nine of them.

I came fourth out of six.

Why it happened is not that I was unlucky. It is that I had made a decision in November and then never revisited it. I had treated my own plan as a fact about the world rather than as a guess, and when I noticed in January that the sport round existed, I did not reopen the question, because reopening it would have meant admitting the plan was wrong.

The lesson is not "prepare everything", which is what I told my mother that evening and which is not really true — nobody can prepare everything, and choosing is necessary.

The lesson is that a decision made six weeks ago was made by somebody with less information than you now have, and that refusing to look at it again is not commitment. It is fear of having been wrong.

I still make plans. I now put a date in the corner of the page on which I have to look at them again.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE tasks, and content marks are counted against all three:

1. EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED
2. WHY IT HAPPENED — a separate task, and the one candidates skip
3. WHAT LESSON you learnt

Task two is the difficult one, and it is what distinguishes a strong answer. "I failed because I was unlucky" or "because I was nervous" explains nothing. A real cause — a decision, a habit, a blind spot — gives the composition something to think about.

Note that the question requires you to have FAILED. A narrative where you succeed after all, or where the disappointment turns out not to matter, has not answered it.

THE LESSON should be earned by the story and slightly unexpected. Notice that the model explicitly rejects the obvious lesson ("prepare everything") before arriving at a better one. That move — dismissing the easy conclusion — is worth copying. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.