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Faculty of Humanities

Psychology

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Essay Writing

Reading Questions

You need to be able to ‘deconstruct’ the questions into their constituent skills and parts.

You need to know that skills are being asked for in the question.

Your ability is tested according to two main skill areas: AO1 and AO2.

AO1 => narrative: giving information and showing understanding.

AO2 => commentary: being able to offer some comments about the narrative, such as evaluating the points made or showing how they fit into a wider theory of knowledge.

Time Management

This involves time management between questions and within questions.

Each question is worth 30 minutes (except for Unit 5 – 45 minutes each), so if you extend the time you give to one question, you are effectively stealing it from another.

The 30 minutes includes thinking time, pencil-sharpening and all those other time- consuming activities that we must do in an examination. This means, in reality, you tend to have around 25 or so minutes of writing time for each question.

Based on reasoning that it is easier to push a mark up from 10 to 16, then to push it from 16 to 20.

The second problem is to manage your time within a question, so that all the different aspects and requirements of the question are covered.

To perform effectively and maximise your marks for any particular question you need a strategy.

• Decide EXACTLY what is required in each question, or part of a question.
  

• Calculate how much time should be allocated to each aspect of the question.
  

• Divide the answer into about 6 paragraphs, about 5 minutes per paragraph.
  

• Plan what will go into each paragraph.
  

• Finally, stick to that plan, and don’t go over the allocated time span.  

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