AQA command words explained: what each one is asking for

Most of the marks I see students lose are not lost on knowledge. They are lost because a question said explain and the answer described, or said assess and the answer listed. The content was there. It was just doing the wrong job. It is the most common mistake in GCSE and the most fixable, because what has to change is a habit rather than what you know.

AQA takes its command words from Ofqual’s official list and publishes definitions for them, subject by subject. Each one asks for something specific, and a scoring answer has a shape you can learn. The part that catches people out is that the same word is not marked the same way in Geography, History and Science.

What does each AQA command word mean?

AQA’s own definitions are in the second column, in its wording. The last column is what that means once you are actually writing. Mark ranges are typical rather than fixed, because they vary by subject and paper.

What do state, name, identify and give actually want?

Very little, and that is the point of them. They are where students who know their content lose time rather than marks. A one-mark state question wants a word or a short phrase. Writing three sentences will not get you two marks, and on a paper where you are fighting the clock those sentences are borrowed from the nine-marker at the end.

The one thing worth being careful about is name. AQA defines it as identifying something using a recognised technical term, so “the tube that carries water up the plant” is a description, and “xylem” is the answer.

Describe vs explain: the most expensive confusion in GCSE

If you fix one thing today, fix this. Describe means give an account of what is there. Explain means give reasons. They look similar on the page and they are marked completely differently, because the mark scheme for an explain question awards linked reasoning and there is nothing to award if your answer never reaches a because.

The habit that fixes it is small: before you write anything, underline the command word, and if it is explain, write the word because somewhere in your first sentence. You can tidy it later. It forces the answer into the right shape from the start.

The high-mark commands: analyse, assess, evaluate and discuss

These are the questions worth 6, 9, 12 or 16 marks, so they decide your grade. All four ask you to do something with information rather than reproduce it, and the difference between them is what they want at the end.

Analyse

Separate information into components and identify their characteristics. No judgement is required. On a question with a figure, the components are usually the overall trend, the anomalies, and any groups or scales in the data. Take each in turn and say what it shows, with figures.

Assess

Make an informed judgement. This is analyse plus a verdict, and the verdict is where the top band lives. The classic lost mark is an answer that gives three excellent factors, balances them beautifully and then simply stops.

Evaluate

Judge from available evidence. Close to assess, but the emphasis is on the evidence rather than on weighing competing factors. In Science and in the social sciences this usually means strengths, then limitations, then a conclusion that follows from what the evidence can actually support. In a Science answer, limitations mean things like sample size, control of variables and repeatability, not “it could have been better”.

Discuss

Present key points. Discuss is the most forgiving of the four, because coverage is doing more of the work than judgement. Get both sides in properly, with detail, and you are most of the way there. It is still worth finishing with a sentence that lands somewhere.

Does “explain” mean the same thing in every subject?

Not quite. AQA publishes command word lists per subject, and the wording really does differ. Its general list defines explain as “give reasons”; the GCSE Geography list says “set out purposes or reasons”. It defines discuss as “present key points”, and the Geography list expands that to key points about different ideas, or the strengths and weaknesses of an idea. The word is the same. The expectation has shifted.

What changes more than the definition is what the mark scheme rewards around it:

• Geography pushes almost everything through AO3, applying knowledge to interpret and evaluate. Extended answers are expected to carry a named, located example and figures from the resource. An excellent general answer with no place in it will not reach the top band.
• History barely uses these words at all. AQA GCSE History (8145) mostly asks in full stems instead: describe two features, explain two ways, write an account, how convincing is the interpretation, how useful are the sources, how far do you agree. Each maps to a specific assessment objective, and how convincing and how useful are source and interpretation skills rather than knowledge questions.
• Science uses explain to mean cause and effect chains, and evaluate to mean judging a method or a piece of data. Its describe questions often want a procedure, in order, rather than a pattern.
• English hardly uses the command word list. Its questions ask how a writer achieves something, or how far you agree with a statement, and the mark scheme rewards analysis of method with quotation.

The practical upshot: learn the general meanings from the table above, then read two or three real mark schemes for your subject. Half an hour of that shows you exactly how your own subject words things.

Timing, and where the SPaG marks actually are

These two questions come up alongside command words constantly, and the answers are more specific than most students expect.

Timing. A minute a mark is the usual rule and it is generous on most AQA papers. GCSE Geography Paper 1 is 88 marks in 90 minutes, so about a minute a mark. GCSE History Paper 1 is 84 marks in 2 hours, so nearer a minute and a half. Work out your own ratio before the exam and write it at the top of the paper. The reason the rule matters is not the short questions, it is that people over-write the two-markers and then have eleven minutes for a sixteen-mark essay.

SPaG. It is worth far less than students fear in some subjects and far more in others. In GCSE Geography, 3 marks on Paper 1, 3 on Paper 2 and 6 on Paper 3, so 12 of 252. In GCSE History, 4 marks on each of the two papers, so 8 of 168. In GCSE English Literature it sits in AO4 at about 5% of the qualification. And in GCSE English Language it is AO6, worth 20% of the whole qualification, 16 of the 40 marks on each writing question. If you have been treating accuracy as a rounding error, that is true almost everywhere except the subject where you write the most.

There is some real evidence behind that last point. In GCSEPod’s own Knowledge and Confidence Gap Analysis Report, drawn from more than 80,000 Key Stage 4 students answering its own quiz questions in 2022/23 (so it shows where GCSEPod users struggled rather than students in general), the weakest English Language area was AO6, with apostrophes and quotation marks at 69.1% incorrect attempts. The same report found the most common science errors were applying a concept to an unfamiliar context and processing data, which is precisely what analyse and evaluate questions are built to test.

How to practise this in an evening

Command words are a drilling problem, not a reading problem. The fastest route is to take one topic you already know and write three answers to it: a describe, an explain and an assess. Then mark them against a real AQA mark scheme, which is free on AQA’s past papers and mark schemes page. AQA also publishes an unusually good teaching guide, Get to grips with GCSE Geography command words, with worked examples from real papers. It is a PDF written for teachers, which is why nobody reads it on a phone, and it is worth the ten minutes.

If you want to see the shape of a top-band answer rather than a mark scheme’s description of one, Save My Exams writes model answers for its topic questions and they are genuinely well done. The complete set sits on its Premium tier, which was £25 a month, £20 a month on the three-month plan or £8 a month billed annually when we checked on 8 September 2026.

The tedious part is sourcing enough questions with the right command word on the topic you are weak on, and that is what Aicademy is for here: name the command word and the topic and it writes as many as you are willing to answer. In its daily review the command word in a short-answer question is underlined, so you can tap it and see what it is asking for before you start writing, which is the moment the reminder is worth anything. Its lessons on Geography exam technique, History interpretation questions and English Language Paper 1 Question 3 cover the structures the mark schemes reward, and they are free to read with no account.

For the wider picture, see how to revise for GCSE and, if you do Science, the guide to what is actually on your Combined or Triple spec.

Aicademy, the practice tool mentioned above, is ours. The definitions are not: they are AQA’s own wording, and every source on this page is linked below so you can check the lot.