As requested, some tips for History Paper 3! Mostly concerning exam technique, which can be a problem for lots of people. So, our tips for how to battle through successfully... 1. Make the most of your reading time. In an ideal world, you will have used the reading time to select which questions you want to do, because this is a tight exam for time! 2. Keep calm and carry on. The questions are often ones which do not appear to match up directly with the topics you have studied in your History lessons. Dont be thrown off by this! Pull yourself together and think more broadly. You should still have the knowledge overall to answer the questions, it just may not be categorised in the way youre used to. As a particularly extreme example, I know people who saw a question about comparing two fascist dictators and immediately did Hitler and Stalin. Why? Theyd learnt about them in the same topic and were used to comparing Hitler and Stalin. So, take a step back and think about the question and think about your knowledge outside the context in which you originally learnt the material. If you do this and dont panic, you should be able to come up with a decent essay. 3. Back to back essays can cause back to back burn-out! Consider that after the first two essays your hand will be killing you, your brain will be frazzled and youll be feeling pushed for time. One useful suggestion to combat this is that you try to at least roughly plan all three of the essays at the beginning when your mind is fresh. Once youve got them planned, the main stress is gone and you can literally just divide the rest of your time into three and go for it without worrying about coming up with the second and third essays. There are of course many ways to skin a cat (as they say) but this is the one we suggest! 4. A useful thought for the exam - it is better to produce three mediochre essays than one AMAZING one and two where you ran out of time. Even if you feel like youre really strong on one essay and have less to say for the other two, dont fall into the trap of paying less attention to them. At the end of the day, even if you absolutely smash one essay, its only 33.3% of the marks - which isnt great! Try to have a balanced approach, divide your time as equally as possible and overall its better to get 15+15+15 than 20+10+10. If you know what I mean! All the best!
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 10:51:16 +0000
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