Your school has started a photography club that meets after lessons. The school magazine has asked students to write a review of it. Here are some comments ...

Exercise 6 is worth 15 marks: 6 for content and 9 for language, marked separately. Unlike Exercise 5, there are no bullets to answer. The four comments are a starting point, not a plan, and the highest content levels are reserved for responses that add ideas of their own.

Earning the 6 content marks. A review has four jobs, and Level 6 (6 marks) requires all four.

1. Inform. Say what the club actually is and what happens at it, since a reader of the school magazine may never have been. When it meets, who runs it, what a typical session involves.
2. Judge. Give one clear overall verdict and give it early, so the reader knows where the review stands.
3. Support both sides. Weigh strengths against weaknesses with examples. The comments supply both: a tutor who explains everything twice, which suits complete beginners, against six cameras for twenty members, which means waiting.
4. Add your own idea. Something not in the comments: the cost, the standard of the photographs produced, whether the club could borrow cameras from the art department, whether an earlier start would help those catching buses.

Copying the four comments one after another with nothing added keeps content in the middle levels, around 2 or 3 marks, however correct the English is.

Earning the 9 language marks. Range: evaluative vocabulary that is precise (patient, well organised, frustrating, worth the wait) rather than repeated good and bad, plus concessive structures for balance (although, even so, on the other hand, despite this). Accuracy: present simple for what the club is like generally, past simple for the one trip you cite as evidence. Register: written for fellow students in a school magazine, so lively but not slangy. Organisation: an opening line that draws the reader in, a paragraph of description, a paragraph of judgement, and a recommendation naming who would enjoy it.

Model response (about 150 words)

Worth the wait: the photography club
The photography club meets in Room 12 every Tuesday from five until half past six, and it is the most useful new thing the school has started this year, provided you can stay that late.
Mr Ibrahim runs it, and he explains every setting twice without ever making anyone feel foolish. If you have never held a camera, start here. Better still, we do not sit in a classroom. Last month the whole group spent the session at the harbour photographing boats in the evening light, and the results are on the wall outside the library.
The problems are real, though. Six cameras between twenty members means a good deal of standing about, and a five o'clock start is impossible for anyone on the school bus.
If the club could borrow the art department's two cameras and begin at four, it would be excellent. As it is, it is very good.

Where marks are commonly lost here. Reviews built entirely from the four comments stay in the middle bands. Responses that praise everything are unbalanced, so the reader cannot judge. Others drift into a narrative of one afternoon and never evaluate the club at all, which is description rather than review.