This week I launched my course on how to get top grades in Paper 1A of AQA GCSE literature. Here is the course.
The aim behind the course is to make sure that any and every student who completes it gets at least a grade 7, but hopefully a grade 8 or 9.
The first 20 students who sign up get unlimited marking from me for 30 days. There are, at the time of writing, 12 spaces left. I have only advertised it here - tomorrow I will also let my YouTube viewers know.
Every answer I have received so far is grade 9 - it looks like the course is working! I couldn’t be more pleased.
This answer scores 16 marks, which is the beginning of grade 9. It is based on the June 2019 paper, which you can find here.
The course teaches students how to get 100% in each question. In particular, it shows you how writing one explanation for each mark gets you every mark. 20 marks on question 4 means 20 explanations which answer the question.
Student Answer to June 2019 Question
My Marking
The question was:
A student said, ‘This part of the story, where Alice is sent back along the road to find what has fallen from the roof and returns with the chrysanthemums, shows how hard and cruel Hartop is, so that all of our sympathy is with Alice.’
To what extent do you agree?
Remember that question 4 always includes two opinions. Here the are that:
Hartop is cruel
As a result of this, we sympathise completely with Alice, not with Hartop
Ok, we have 20 explanations, so there are potentially 20 marks.
So, let’s see if we have a mark for each explanation.
2 is not an explanation relevant to the question. It gains no marks.
3 contains two explanations. So it is worth 2 marks.
14 is a sophisticated use of contextual knowledge which students wouldn’t normally know. It is definitely worth a mark.
16 is possibly just another way of rephrasing 15, so may not score a mark.
17 doesn’t explain whether we should be sympathetic towards Alice, or whether Hartop is cruel. That is explained in 18. So, 17 doesn’t score a mark.
Remember, each explanation has to answer one of the two opinions in the question.
19 is a very good explanation, but it needs these words to score: “which means his cruelty may be justified” or “which means we sympathise with him rather than Alice”. Or, words which are similar. These are necessary to make sure the explanation answers one of the two opinions.
20 is a conclusion which just summarises explanations which have already been made. So it scores no marks.
So, this means the answer is worth 16 marks.
And that is the start of grade 9.
Footnote
There are errors of grammar and spelling in this answer. The examiner will ignore these – they only get marked in question 5.
This is the example answer from the Examiner
I think both Alice and Hartop are deserving of our sympathy, so it doesn’t all go to Alice.
Although his wife tries to protest, Hartop is determined that Alice is going out in the wind, rain and darkness to look for whatever fell off the van roof.
Our sympathy for Alice seems assured as the writer tells us that, to Alice, the van ‘seemed to be moving away rapidly’,
with the adverb ‘rapidly’ suggesting Hartop’s careless lack of compassion
in leaving Alice isolated and abandoned.
However, Alice’s acceptance of this suggests that she is used to her father’s uncompromising and harsh ways
so she ‘stoically’ accepts the discomfort and pain of the wind and rain as her duty.
Later, the writer uses the conspiratorial relationship between mother and daughter, through dialogue, as a way perhaps to create sympathy for Hartop.
Having successfully returned with the flowers, he overhears Alice say to her mother that it was ‘Only a bunch of chrysanthemums’, meaning that it was nothing, it was hardly worth the trouble he caused her to find them, that they are not important.
Alice felt safe saying this to her mother but ‘Hartop appeared at the very moment she was speaking’.
Since the chrysanthemums are his livelihood, his business, he is indignant and angry.
Although confrontational, Hartop is not cruel;
he is just a frustrated, struggling, poor man trying to earn a living against the odds - and as such is deserving of our sympathy.
This is not a full answer.
One rule of thumb to test the quality is to look at the number of words written – 245.
That means a full 20 mark answer would need to be at least 245/13 points X 20 points. This would make it at least 377 words, writing as an adult.
Our student averages 11 words per line, over about 50 lines. That’s 550 words to write 20 points, which suggests that the student is indeed writing enough to gain the marks.
On the whole, students in real life tend to spend about 24 words per mark scored, and that would give us a target of at least 480 words.
Therefore, you can get a feel for how much writing you need to do to make the points you need to write. And then practise writing at sufficient speed to be able to do this in the 30 minutes question 4 gives you.
I’m very excited that my course, so far, seems to be teaching students how to get top grades.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you a student who has already learned to score 100% on this question.
Hello Sir! I recently bought the course and I'm loving it so far- you've broken down the questions and method in a concise yet powerful way, which makes it so much easier to understand, and I can see my answers improving already! I was wondering where we send you practice questions to mark? Do we put it in the comments of the course or substack or is there a different method?