Exam advice for AS students

With around two weeks to go here’s my advice for AS students. First of all, don’t panic! You need a strategy and to go carefully step by step. There’s still time to pull it round if necessary. Here’s what I think you should do.

1. Prepare summary sheets – if necessary do it with your friends and duplicate. A summary sheet should have the following elements. a. Key terms or what we call technical vocabulary. Look up the technical vocabulary that’s listed in the syllabus and learn what the terms mean. Test each other. b. Key elements of the theory or issues of the applied material. c. Some short key quotes from philosophers. d. Three strengths and three weaknesses. e. Alpha points. An alpha point is a subtler point that only an A grade candidate would make. If you can’t think of any then discuss this with friends. Is there some paradox or seeming contradiction within the theory? Is there a contrast we can make e.g. between Kant and Mill’s idea of a rule?

2. Revise last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Having prepared your summary sheet try revising it just before you go to sleep and then just as you wake up. It’s amazing how the brain absorbs things without you having to do much more!

3. Prepare mindmaps that represent sequences of ideas. The moral theories all start somewhere and end up somewhere. So where do we start? Probably better to start general eg utilitarianism is teleological and consequentialist and then move on to the different forms. The ultimate end? Maximising happiness. But what makes Singer different from Mill?

4. Examine past questions with a group of friends. Ask the question: what question would I set this year if I was the examiner? Areas that haven’t been examined for a bit (or ever) have a slightly higher chance of coming up this year. But don’t over-rely on this. You can probably afford to leave out one syllabus area – but not two or three! My attempt at being the examiner is contained in the blog section of this site – just go to "2014 exam questions" and you'll find them. No tricky riddles this year!

5. Start now writing under timed conditions. Buy a cooking timer and set it to 45 minutes. Take a past question and spend a few minutes sketching a plan. Then write! If you want to, begin by writing using your summaries but make sure you discard the summary sheet as soon as you’re confident enough and just write. One of the biggest reasons students drop grades is they spend too little time on part a and too much on part b. So write for about 25 to 30 minutes on part a and about 12 to 15 minutes on part b.

6. And finally..think about the word “explain”. This doesn’t mean evaluate. You explain in part a and evaluate in part b of the answers. It means “make completely clear the reasons and reasoning behind the following theory etc”. Expose the philosophical minds behind the question. Ask yourself the question: how does this moral theory derive the idea of goodness and how does it then apply the principles so derived? Try to turn this into a brief summary statement of the essence of the theory which you can pre-prepare to launch your answer. Example: "Natural Law theory derives the idea of goodness from the rational purposes common to all human beings in order to fulfil the intrinsic goodness of a flourishing life".