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Top tips to kick-start your AS Unit 1 Revision . What should you be doing?. With the exams approaching it’s important to get into a high gear and prepare fully. Get organised Sort out files, identify gaps and fill them. Make a plan
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What should you be doing? • With the exams approaching it’s important to get into a high gear and prepare fully. • Get organised • Sort out files, identify gaps and fill them. • Make a plan • Identify times when you will revise different key topics. • Make sure you have a copy of the Specification • ….and use this as a checklist to ensure you have covered everything .
Practice makes perfect • Mock on …. • You should practice past questions from Jan 09, June 09 and Jan 10 • Other exam style questions can be found in the textbooks and unit guides that support the course. • The more you do, the more feedback you will get and the greater your improvement will be.
Key terminology • Remember that this is a new Specification. • It contains new terminology which you need to be able to define. You will need to understand both single words and phrases. • The terminology is used in exam questions so you need to know what it all means. • Make glossaries of key terms and consult the textbooks if you are unsure.
Active revision • For the vast majority of students revision works best when it is active. • Passive reading of notes is a poor way to revise. Try to: • Condense notes by re-writing them • Use diagrams and mind maps • Put key case studies and examples onto revision cards
What do I have to do? • One question from a choice of 4 – you should spend 30-35 minutes on this • Each question is worth 25 marks • The 25 marks is split into a 10 mark part ‘a’ and 15 mark part ‘b’ • There is a stimulus resource for the 10 mark question
Choice of Question • Questions will be based around 4 key themes • you can expect to have a genuine choice:
Very importantly you should read all 4 questions • look at all four accompanying Figures before you make a decision. • In January 2009 the choice of question was heavily biased towards questions 7 and 8.
The Resource question, part ‘a’ • Notice that the question states ‘such as the one shown’. • This is indicating a need to move beyond the stimulus material provided and into a discussion of other drought examples and their impacts: • Ongoing Australian drought the ‘big dry’ • Drought in Niger • Drought in Sudan and Ethiopia
There is also a structure provided in the question i.e. ‘people and the environment’ • answer needs to cover both in order to be balanced. • Importantly the question is not ‘what are the impacts of drought?’ but actually ‘why do drought have such severe impacts?’ • Just describing the impacts of drought lacks the explanation the question is looking for.
The Open questions, part ‘b’ • a 15 mark question which will be quite open. • There is no Figure to look at -you are ‘on your own’. • good idea to do a very quick plan just to organise your thoughts and help structure your answer. • The plan should take less than 1 minute
Mark schemes • for the 15 mark question they use 4 levels. • Like a flight of sets which you are trying to climb. • To go up a step, you need to add something new into your answer.
Ticking the mark scheme boxes • can be a real challenge, but there are various tricks you can use to help write an impressive answer. • This question is from January 2009 (Question 10b): • typical. It uses the command word ‘explain’ and is ‘open’. • The question does not directly ask for examples to be used, but you should just assume you should use them!
