Students following this blog will be aware that this is the fifth step of five steps to an A grade. I would advise you to think carefully over these steps and use as much time as you have to practise them in the next few weeks. They can also form very interesting revision lessons.  Please note that as absolute/relative morailty is quite a strong bet to come up this summer, I have just written an article for Dialogue magazine on this very question.  Go to dialogue.org and order a copy if you want to read more about this.

I am aware as I write this fifth step that some of you will be feeling nervous, others very very nervous at the thought of the exam season approaching. Exams are a horrible invention of the utilitarian age. If you can, try to think of them as a kind of game where you can stack the odds in your favour if you follow some fairly simple guidelines (see steps 1 to 4 in the Blog section on this site).

Every year examiners publish a report on the last year’s exam, available on their website. This gives us important clues as to where students are going wrong and hence dropping grades.

Two things particularly recur again and again. And they are two problems easy to fix.

Problem 1: People don’t answer the question set. Seems obvious doesn’t it. But what we tend to do is to master a particular approach to say, utilitarian ethics. For example, we revise from our brilliant essay comparing and contrasting the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Armed with key quotes, points etc we just can’t resist slipping our considerable knowledge in.

Now this is fine if you were a candidate in January of this year where that actual question came up. But it’s not so good for the exam coming up in May as I can guarantee this question won’t be set twice running.

Much better to do two things now:

a. Produce your own summary sheets on utilitarianism.
b. Practise writing as many essays as you can under timed conditions (not a waste of time, believe me!).

Also consider making up your own exam questions as a class and writing opening paragraphs on these.

Which brings me to the second point.

Problem 2: The statement of a view is not an argument. Or to put it another way, a description is not an argument. Nor is an opinion an argument.

So what is an argument? Put simply it is a set of connected reasons and reasoning leading logically to a conclusion. There are some key words that arguments tend to have, such as “because”, “furthermore”, “moreover”, “however”.

My advice is this: begin by stating your conclusion. Imagine we have a question “Explain how utilitarianism establishes how to make a moral choice”. This is a part a. AS OCR question, hence it will contain words like Explain, not evaluation words like Discuss.

My conclusion would be “utilitarian ethics establishes how to make a choice by an empirical process of calculating forseeable consequences according to the Greatest Happiness Principle. In this essay I will examine how two versions, that of Bentham and Mill, use the absolute goods of pleasure and happiness to assess and weigh the relative merits of alternative choices”. There we are. No doubt about where I am going with this: I have marked out the territory.  This is where you need to start.

(And by the way, it’s perfectly okay to use “I” in this way in philosophy essays!).

Present an argument. An argument doesn’t just describe something, it establishes a case by using reasons and reasoning to produce a clear and logical conclusion. Do this and you will get an A grade.  So the examiners keep on telling us.