You're in luck - your guesses are just a bit too pessimistic! It's the method prescribed by my school's curriculum - they take the thing whole from a standards

You're in luck - your guesses are just a bit too pessimistic! It's the method prescribed by my school's curriculum - they take the thing whole from a standards body. You're entirely right, though, to figure that isn't the baseline - there are plenty of "list the Xes" question that pay only lip service to considering an A line of thought versus a B line of thought. Of course, the subject's so subjectively graded that no one's guaranteed that work is proportional to the resultant grade at the highest levels - so there's remarkably little pressure and far more experimentation done than you'd expect from a high-school programme. It's a strange arrangement, but I'm lucky to have fell into it.