What changed since GCSE
The mark schemes moved. Marks are increasingly attached to analysis, evaluation and application, and decreasingly to recall. A perfectly accurate answer that describes when the question said *evaluate* can score very badly indeed — and the student who wrote it walks out believing they did well, because they knew everything.
Revise the command words as seriously as the content
- Describe — say what it is. Low marks, quick.
- Explain — say *why*. Every 'because' is a mark.
- Analyse — break it apart and show how the parts relate.
- Evaluate / Discuss — argue both sides and *reach a judgment*. The judgment is where the top band lives, and it is the thing most people omit.
Get your board's mark schemes and read the top-band descriptors. Not the questions — the *descriptors*. They tell you, explicitly and for free, what a full-mark answer contains. It is astonishing how few students ever read them.
What actually to do
- Card the recall layer — definitions, formulae, dates, case studies. It's necessary, it's not sufficient, and FSRS makes it cheap so you can spend your time elsewhere.
- Then write, timed, to the mark scheme. The application layer is only trained by producing answers, and it is where the grade is decided.
- Mark your own work against the real descriptors, brutally. Generous self-marking is the most common way to be surprised in August.
- Practise essay plans, not full essays. Five plans in an hour beats one essay, because planning is the skill and writing it out is mostly transcription.