to mark someone down

[dilodi83]

- The teacher marked the students down because they answered the wrong questions in the exam.

What do you think this sentence mean? Maybe the teacher gave them a lower mark? Or did he write down on a scrap of paper that the students had answered badly?

[bhaisahab]

- The teacher marked the students down because they answered the wrong questions in the exam.

What do you think this sentence mean? Maybe the teacher gave them a lower mark? Or did he write down on a scrap of paper that the students had answered badly?

He gave them a lower mark.

[BobK]

(This has aways bothered me, but that's the way it's used. It seems to me that if there were, say, 10 marks for that question, and the students didn't do it, 'marking down' is an unreasonable way of putting it; what the teacher was doing was witholding from them marks that they were't entitled to anyway - what he was doing was 'not [unjustifiably] marking them up'.)

b