IGCSE History Paper 2 exam tips
The summer 2018 exam will include a Paper 2 exam on the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. There are extensive revision materials on this topic in the IGCSE/GCSE history revision menu.
This video (also available to download as a podcast) has been created specifically for students studying the CIE IGCSE History 0470 course, but a lot of the advice contained in it is appropriate for all source questions. My advice comes from reading the examiner’s report, which is written by the chief examiner – that’s the person in charge of marking all your exam papers – in which they explain what students do well in the exam and what needs to be improved.
This episode provides general tips on how to improve the quality of source answers, drawn from common mistakes that students make in the CIE IGCSE History 0470 exam. Specific advice is given on how the answer the final 12 mark question, which is always asks how far the collection sources agree (or disagree) with a particular point of view.
If you want more general guidance on answering source papers, download my other podcast called on Succeeding at Sourcework. Although it’s not designed specifically for the CIE Paper 2, it still contains lots of good tips that you might find helpful.
Hello Mr. Allsop, while I was practicing Paper 2, I came across a question which asked if you believed the person in a source. Can you please give me advice on how to answer this question?
This type of question requires you to do analysis of the provenance (who says it, why are they saying it) and comparison to your contextual knowledge/and or the other sources on the paper. When are they writing/saying it? Who is the audience? Is the person speaking publicly or privately? Does the claim fit with what you know of the author’s likely opinion? It is a similar or different message to other sources in the paper?