Yashvi Jasuja

Yashvi Jasuja teaches English: IGCSE Language and Literature, CBSE and ICSE up to Class 12, and the SAT Reading and Writing section. She has a master's in English (Hons) from Punjab University, five years in the classroom, and a TEFL certification.

Her first two weeks with a student are diagnostic. She asks for answers written without help, marks them against the official mark scheme, and works out where the marks are actually going. A student who reads well and still scores badly is usually losing them in the distance between a good answer and one written the way the mark scheme pays out.

The second week goes straight at that gap. What the command words are really asking for, and what each is worth: analyse, evaluate, compare. How to build a paragraph — point, evidence, explanation — so an examiner can see the criteria being met rather than having to look for them. And reading examiner reports and model answers together, so the student can mark their own work instead of waiting for her to do it.

On SAT Reading and Writing she finds the marks go in three places, and vocabulary is rarely one of them. Missed transitions, where a word signalling cause, contrast or a turn in the argument changes the meaning of the sentence. Answers built on what the student already knows about the subject instead of what the passage says. And the distractor that is perfectly true on its own but does not answer the question asked.

The TEFL certification is for a different student: the one whose difficulty is the language itself rather than the set text. That work starts with grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary, and builds until an academic prompt is something the student can take on. A student who is already fluent needs the opposite — the syllabus covered, timing practised, command words drilled, past papers marked.

She also changes register by board. An IGCSE literature answer has to read like the student's own argument about tone, technique and theme, and it is marked on how insightful that reading is. A CBSE or ICSE answer is marked against a key, so it wants the required points, the expected keywords, clear presentation and nothing extra.