ABSTRACT
At this point in the book you have acquired the knowledge necessary to tackle the exam itself. Answering exam questions is a skill and in this chapter we hope to help you improve this skill. A common mistake that some students make is not providing the kind of evidence the examiner is looking for. Another is failing to properly answer the question, despite providing lots of information. Typically, a grade C answer is accurate and reasonably constructed, but has limited detail and commentary. To lift such an answer to an A or B grade may require no more than fuller detail, better use of material and a coherent organisation. By studying the essays below, and the comments that follow, you can learn how to turn your grade C answer into a grade A. Please note that marks given by the examiner in the practice essays should be used as a guide only and are not definitive. They represent the ‘raw marks’ given by an AEB examiner. That is, the 146marks the examiner would give to the examining board based on a total of 25 marks per question broken down into Skill A (description) and Skill B (evaluation). Tables showing this scheme are in Appendix C of Paul Humphreys’ title in the series, Exam Success in AEB Psychology. They may not be the marks given on the examination certificate received ultimately by the student because all examining boards are required to use a common standardised system called the Uniform Mark Scale (UMS) which adjusts all raw scores to a single standard acceptable to all examining boards.
