History help

puttuporshutup

I don't know where I lost my marks in my history mock exam! I managed to get 81% but I want an A in the actual exam.

I was told to have 8 relevant points for the people in history question and I'm pretty sure I had more, yet I got 17/20?
The examiner wrote down 17/17 0/3. Our teacher said the 3 marks were for "overall" but what does that mean? I'm pretty sure my grammar and spellings were fine.
This happened with all my long answers from questions 4 to 6. I just wrote down everything we had learned for said topic but still lost quite a few marks?


Also, I'm not sure what it means by eight relevant "points" does it mean a paragraph or just one fact? Like would, "(said person) was born in (place) in (year)" be considered a point? Or would you have to write about a paragraph on their childhood for it to be a point?

Thanks in advance!

spurious

Any chance you could type out your answer exactly as it is and PM it to me? I have corrected before and can check it for you. I will mark in exactly what is and is not a 'relevant' fact.

The standard of correcting on some of the mock papers was abysmal.

17/17 is not a mark on any SEC History paper, so I don't know what their marking scheme was based on. It should be CM 16 OM 4.

robman60

I actually remember from my mocks last year I got marked 17 for both parts of question four. It's quite likely that the person who corrected your script wouldn't have given full marks no matter what was put in fromt of them. It's part and parcel of the mocks really.

As Spurious has said, 16 marks are for content, while the other four are for overall coherence. I'm pretty sure a lot of students would do badly on the overall coherence part, so I'll try to give you some hints that I found useful:

-Memorise important pieces of information, but create full sentences around that information.
-Order your points chronologically. If writing about the life of a particular person, mention things in order. For example if you're writing about Christopher Columbus, don't start with him landing in America. Start with his birth place (Genoa, Italy), and continue from there.

Good luck!

Jolly Red Giant

One other important point is that the SEC have been expecting a far more rounded piece than before - for example - writing about someone living in Ancient Rome, students used to get numerous marks for talking about all the different rooms in a Roman house - now the max is 4 - students used to get a lot of marks for talking about gladiator fights in detail - now the max is 4. So the SEC is expecting a far more rounded essay these days.

robman60 wrote: »

-Order your points chronologically. If writing about the life of a particular person, mention things in order. For example if you're writing about Christopher Columbus, don't start with him landing in America. Start with his birth place (Genoa, Italy), and continue from there.

Actually this is not correct - many of the People in History have specific 'background' sections - for Columbus everything up to asking Ferdinand and Isabella to fund his voyage is background and you get a max of 2 marks - for Washington everything up to the first Continental Congress is background and a max of 2 marks.

Same with conclusions - for Columbus you must talk about his first voyage to the New World - everything after his return home is conclusion and a max of 2 marks - so don't write lots of stuff about his other voyages.