Advice for studying history

Steve01

For the attention of all you history students out there:

Whats the best way to study history? Its a long, long course so there must be a way of breaking it down into managable chunks. Usually I'd go through the most important sections of each book (and only the important sections), learn them off perfectly and then apply whatever's relevant to the question I've been given. But I got my mock back today and I only got 66%, which is very low considering all my best topics came up. Either they did an appalling job correcting the paper or I need a new study method.

Whoever corrected them paid no attention to the marking scheme. They didn't assign a mark to each paragraph and only gave an overall grade. For instance I got 55/100 for the question about women in WW1, even though I gave 10 decent paragraphs that were loaded with relevant information. The only comment the examiner left was that I didn't mention some stuff thats not even in the textbook!

I'm aiming for an A in the Leaving Cert. Should this be passed off as shoddy marking or is there a better way of studying history/ answering essay questions?

JC 2K3

What has your teacher said about how it was marked?

Steve01

Nothing. He's not the most approachable man tbh (didn't realise how essays are being marked under the current course until a few months ago) so I thought why not hear from the great scholars here

Haven't a Clue

Tbh, a question like the women in the workplace doesn't have enough relevant info to warrant a 100 mark question in the first place. Like, you'll find only around 7 pages max in the textbook dedicated to a topic like that.

I'm not sure what the hell I'm gonna do for history. I'm gonna have the case studies sorted anyway, hopefully the essay'll get me a B, then hope to jesus that the topics that come up in the summer are the ones I've studied.

Steve01

Haven't a Clue wrote:

Tbh, a question like the women in the workplace doesn't have enough relevant info to warrant a 100 mark question in the first place. Like, you'll find only around 7 pages max in the textbook dedicated to a topic like that.

I think 7 pages is the norm for most of the case studies. Somehow I found well over 4 A4 pages worth of relevant information for my essay, though maybe the result speaks for itself...

Haven't a Clue

Steve01 wrote:

I think 7 pages is the norm for most of the case studies. Somehow I found well over 4 A4 pages worth of relevant information for my essay, though maybe the result speaks for itself...

Yeah, but they're done in mind for the 1 or 1 1/2 page essays you do in the case study section of the paper. Like, they shouldn't expect you to do a 100 mark q on that.

Goebels

ideally, the best way is to write out a list of all possible essay titles from each section. Write the essays, learn them of course, and you should be fine.

fillefatale

I'm going over my good essays, and just studying through the book for things i maybe haven't written on.

Rozabeez

I write out plans, with them I jot down what I'm supposed to know per topic. With a plan you'll have a basic idea of what you're meant to be writing about and it'll help you remember things in point form for your paragraphs.

RandolphEsq

I write out notes on each chapter and then just learn them off and re-write them in the exam. I pick a question that is broad e.g.How did the divisions over the treaty lead to civil war in ireland?. It seems to work, I got 96% in the mocks, was let down in the documents because you cant really do the same for those

estebancambias

can someone tell me the marking scheme for the essays

Selphie

Goebels wrote:

ideally, the best way is to write out a list of all possible essay titles from each section. Write the essays, learn them of course, and you should be fine.

I know you said "ideally" but I think that's a little impractical, tbh, especially at this stage. A lot of things could come up relating to any topic. I think its just best to focus on a lot of things.
Oh and OP our history papers were corrected appallingly aswell. My teacher brought most of us up.

Mushy

estebancambiass wrote:

can someone tell me the marking scheme for the essays

Ok, its split into 2 here: a cumulative Mark(CM), and an overall evaluation(OE). The CM is marked out of 60, based on your score from the paragraphs that you have done. The OE is a total evaluation of what is in your essay, as in, how relevant the stuff is to the question being asked. That is marked out of 40. That clear enough?

Right now in class/homework/study, we're just getting loads of essays. By 20 past 10 tomorrow, I'll have done 2 this week:eek:. we finished the course a while back, and so are going over everything again, and doing the essays within 40 mins everytime. Its lucky we finished relatively early, as its giving us this chance to study it everyday in class. Most annoying thing: my crap mocks score, but anyway, it was marked awfully and I'm not too concerned about them, cos with the project, its all different