History - The Response

Orizio

Rockerette wrote:

jees guys just cos it didnt suit you, dont call it "bizarre or obsurd". it was fine

They have a point.The Bismarck and Church Relations/Naval Policy was easy enough to me,but it was in itself a very strange way to ask a question.They aren't actually linked in anyway,and it was obvious that Naval Policy was far more damaging to Germany.

Screwed it up myself.Short on time,stamina and I was just sooooo tired that I left out part 4 on Parnell and didn't quite finish the Fascism essay.Story of my leaving cert really.Was expecting a B;should get a solid C which isn't good enough.

I can see a few people complaining about how the questions were asked really.,although it wasn't an overly difficult paper.

Yufster

After the History Exam my friend and I woed about it for a bit.

"What did you do for the Irish Question?" I asked casually. Then I paused and added: "OR DID YOU GET LLOYD GEORGE TO DO IT FOR YOU!?!" Then I laughed really hysterically for a bit and thought about how funny I am.


In other news, I can't believe I messed up the first question. I'm such a nonce. First of all I think I completely misinterpeted the cartoon... I said it represented Gladstone failing to get Home Rule but trying so hard that he erm, broke the liberal party, and that Parnell was pretending to help by holding his hat while Gladstone laboured away. I don't know! And then I did the worst thing ever. I couldn't think of any PARTICULARLY good or bad things that Parnell did, so I left the question for a bit and decided to go back to it after clearing my head a bit.

I ran out of time in the exam because my answer for 1912 - 1920 was so long. And I didn't go back to that question to finish it.

Easy marks lost. Ahh well.

Rockerette

i really dont get some of you guys... all these topics are in the book, so why shouldnt they come up as essays?!

someone mentioned something that was "tipped" - TIPPED BY WHO!??!?!!!????




just because not everything could be predicted on it, (like say the English paper...) people seem to be having a hissy fit.

d4gurl, of course im happy with it if it went well for me..! but thats not my point.. Im not the only one here who was happy with it, and im not some big history nerd or anything, i just used my head, and covered a good few topics...



Fair play to the Dept. for not being as predictable as most people expected...

GrumPy

Rockerette wrote:

Fair play to the Dept. for not being as predictable as most people expected...

I really dont think you get the point. The questions were very weird, nothing at all like the sample papers, and there was almost no case studies, again nothing like sample papers. :rolleyes: I passed, and I answered 2 of my three essays well. But thats not the point! It was still a nasty paper. Fair enough you had the right stuff covered, and hope you get the result you deserve, but I still think the paper was alot different to how it should have been.
And no, I am not pissed off cause it wasn't easy, I'm just a bit confused how random it was.

Rockerette

in the topics i did, there was 5 out of the 9 case studies that you coudla written about..




How "should" the paper have been can i ask?



im really not tryin to piss people off here or anything.. and im sorry that i didnt go as well as most of you hoped.. i know that feeling.. but.. i dunno. im really not trying to be arrogant or annoying here, i promise im not...!


Eg. Dictatorship & Democracy, what was wrong with the questions?

i genuinely dont see a problem..
- Reasons for growth of Fascism
- Stalin's influece on society & economy
- Britain between the Wars
- Warfare Technology..

Use your head to answer the bits like "to what extent", or "how successful"..

anyways, im sure im just pissing people off so i'll stop...

blahhh

I had a wee panic attack this mornin as....that's when i decided to start studyin for history :eek:

So I gave ordinary a lash.....twas very do-able......

although looks like all case studies i looked at came up on honours.. frig......... :mad:

anna.fun

I thought the history paper was easy enough and the questions were alright if you would have studied... the only thing was that I was stuck for time. Wrote about 2,5 or 3 pages for each essay and finished just at 4.50 ...

did South North WW2 impact on society and economy and included the Blitz of Belfast Case Study

Then did the Bismarck and Wilhelm 2. question and then the facism question...

think I'll be getting a B2 or B1

GrumPy

Rockerette wrote:

How "should" the paper have been can i ask?





Eg. Dictatorship & Democracy, what was wrong with the questions?

i genuinely dont see a problem..
- Reasons for growth of Fascism
- Stalin's influece on society & economy
- Britain between the Wars
- Warfare Technology..

Paper should have been asked like the SAMPLE papers. It's a bit like a sample of urine, if you get a blue sample back 3 months later, your like wtf?

The question you mentioned above was fine, now I'f I had the time to list all the little weirdass things I'd be hear all night, and I have art in the morning. (check out my semi-leet editing skills)

d4gurl

I agree with grumpy the most weird question on the paper was Wilhelm 2 and Bismark! Its my own fault for only studyin bismarks foreign poilcy, women in the work force in w2 and wilhelm shud of done bismark and church and colonism oh wel anwsered the question!the other two parts were grand!that question just got me down! I was like wtf? I kept saying Bismark and the church had bad relations but this was not as damagin as Wilhelm two's naval policy and then I went on a rant bout Wilhelm two and the hms dreadnought!hopefully special topic will bring me up!

GrumPy

d4gurl wrote:

I agree with grumpy the most weird question on the paper was Wilhelm 2 and Bismark! Its my own fault for only studyin bismarks foreign poilcy, women in the work force in w2 and wilhelm shud of done bismark and church and colonism oh wel anwsered the question!the other two parts were grand!that question just got me down! I was like wtf? I kept saying Bismark and the church had bad relations but this was not as damagin as Wilhelm two's naval policy and then I went on a rant bout Wilhelm two and the hms dreadnought!hopefully special topic will bring me up!

"Bismarck's church relations didnt cause as much damage to Germany as Wilhelm's naval policy"- BOOOM

"In 1897, Admiral von tirpitz *3 pages later* to conclude, Wilhelm's naval poilcy was the single biggest cause of the outbreak of war in 1918, and clearly caused more damage than Bismarck to Germany in the depression that was sustained by the German economy during and after the inter-war period"

:rolleyes: yeah, so I basically just wrote about teh naval policy.

d4gurl

mine is the exact same!haha! I remember months ago however when are teacher gave us an essay on the ecconomic policies of Stalin and Lenin! back then he told us you only need to mention Lenin but make sure to refer to him! I just wish i had somehting on d stupid church! go on d HMS dreadnought!what an aniyalotor!! oh I got in this quote - Bismark had played chess Wilhelm had played poker! stupid corrector better mark that one a bit easy!!

GrumPy

d4gurl wrote:

oh I got in this quote - Bismark had played chess Wilhelm had played poker! /quote]

Not relevant to the question at all really :rolleyes: But Im sorry I didnt put it in It's a great quote.

d4gurl

Irish GrumPy wrote:

d4gurl wrote:

oh I got in this quote - Bismark had played chess Wilhelm had played poker! /quote]

Not relevant to the question at all really :rolleyes: But Im sorry I didnt put it in It's a great quote.

haha i know! I jus wanted to show of! hehe! Actually i think i brought it in sayin the church and bismark had bad relations that said bismark maintaind the peace of europe through his system of allinace while wilehm two broke thes down and destroyed germany

well alon those lines! why didn a lovely quesiton just on bismarks foreign policy come up?i would of gotten 100%

GrumPy

d4gurl wrote:

why didn a lovely quesiton just on bismarks foreign policy come up?i would of gotten 100%

Because your god is vengeful, and you had impure thoughts.

Gambra

Anyone else do the question on Alexander Solzhenitsyn & Simone de Beauvoir? I thought it was ridicuiosly easy. True I'd researched their stuff myself completly away from the history course but still.. I did it instead of the topic I was supposed to do, the Dictatorship & Democracy one. I'm well pleased..

d4gurl

Irish GrumPy wrote:

Because your god is vengeful, and you had impure thoughts.

bah humbug meath drogheda boy

GrumPy

Hey!! no fair! I am A Dub, moved house 2 years ago. Go back to your precious dubes.

d4gurl

u go back to ur dubes!! u are assuming so much about me just from my name!haha wel i did dat to u too grumpy!! change ur name from drogheda/meath!did u kno i was born in drogheda and lived in meath for like 5 year!??!!! woah! bye farm boy

Rockerette

d4gurl wrote:

I just wish i had somehting on d stupid church!

do you not have a text book???!

Tellox

Rockerette wrote:

in the topics i did, there was 5 out of the 9 case studies that you coudla written about..




How "should" the paper have been can i ask?



im really not tryin to piss people off here or anything.. and im sorry that i didnt go as well as most of you hoped.. i know that feeling.. but.. i dunno. im really not trying to be arrogant or annoying here, i promise im not...!


Eg. Dictatorship & Democracy, what was wrong with the questions?

i genuinely dont see a problem..
- Reasons for growth of Fascism
- Stalin's influece on society & economy
- Britain between the Wars
- Warfare Technology..

Use your head to answer the bits like "to what extent", or "how successful"..

anyways, im sure im just pissing people off so i'll stop...

Im sure your whinge about tips was directed towards me, so I'll reply.
The radio's, as well as many teachers, were tipping 1916 as of the 90th anniversary, and the first year of the marches. Hitler, teachers of a few schools were mentioning downfall, and his importance in him coming up.

But Im not complaining. I knew 2/4 questions on each topic, and answered them. Im just stating that some of the questions asked were very odd, and the less astute of us might have failed as a result.

Attractive Nun

I must agree with Rockerette on this one to a large extent. The way people were going on about the case studies, the history course would have been reduced to people just studying them. They had to nip that in the bud, as they say, and best do it in the first year of the exam really.The documents question, I think we are all agreed, was fine. The two European questions that I did, too, were grand.

Dictatorship & Democracy - open question about Stalin, technology of warfare, lovely question on the rise of fascism, inter-war problems of Britain. Alright maybe a bit focused on the political and economic perspectives, but thank Christ it was because the the culture and religion bit of that topic is horsecrap.

Division & Realignment - Eastern European opposition to Sovietisation, the EEC, (admittedly nasty) question on the Oil Crisis, Literature & Social Criticism. Covered a wide range of perspectives, included a case study.

Sovereignty and Partition wasn't great for me personally since I studied nothing after the Civil War, but it has to be conceded that they spread across the perspectives with pretty basic questions. And for people like me they even put in a really open question (if you think about it) on partition for the first part of the book.

OK, the Bismarck topic seems to be the most contentious one here, and I can't comment on that, but apart from the lack of a focus on case studies (which they really had to do), there was nothing really wrong with that paper if you've studied properly, or if like me you've fluked it

Attractive Nun

Oh, and in another thread yesterday I hoped for:

1885/6 Elections (score), Easter Rising (score, sort of, I worked it into that partition question), Mussolini (ok, failure, but Stalin is a good second best), Moves towards European Unity (score)

Happy camper!

doonothing

ok, of course they shouldnt have put on too many case studies in each section, as you said, the course would be reduced to 12 chapters, but what threw me was the fact that there was sooo many case studies in the sample paper.
its like they were trying to throw us off with that sample paper.
meanies.

Attractive Nun

Yeah fair enough they probably shouldn't have done that. I reckon they probably meant to make case studies a key focus of the course, and that's why they put them in the sample papers. But when the Institute and everyone else started going mad saying a case study was virtually guaranteed to come up in every section they realised they had to dispell the idea. Imagine they had put them in, fair enough there would be no problem this year but next year everyone would be even more focused on them and the vicious circle would commence.

I do think there's simply too much on the history course though if they're going to be so random, they really need to find a happy medium with these case studies.

Kovik

To respond to those people that were talking earlier about how the exam was not "weird" but merely unpredictable: My gripe is not that the paper didn't contain the topics I'd predicted to come up, but that the department changed the structure of the exam fairly drastically and essentially ignored the layout and, in fairness, the content, structure and requirements of the syllabus. Those are fairly major errors.

I just want to point this out too: In the Dictatorship and Democracy section of the paper, a lot of you seemed to have answered the question on Stalin using the show trials. The show trials are placed in the politics and administration aspect of the course while the question cited economy and society as the perspective, meaning socialism in one country, collectivisation and reform of working conditions. The syllabus doesn't consider the show trials to be a component of social or economic history in Russia. The economic case study is the Jarrow March. There's no case study for culture in this topic and it's accepted that the show trials are meant as a surrogate for that, the Nuremburg rallies being the other political case study. So, I suppose, it's sort of a grey area.

Mind you, since they pretty much abandoned the parameters of their own syllabus, you might get away with it. But yeah, strictly speaking the question was about Stalin's social and economic agendas, of which the show trials were not a part of.

Kovik

And yes, they should have put case studies everywhere as it was implied in the layout of the sample paper. However, to discourage merely learning the case studies, they could (as was done in the sample paper itself) tie the case studies in with other chapters or ask extremely technical or specific questions regarding them. It'd be irresponsible to go back and what was a fairly blatant implication by them.

UnitedIrishman

Really cocked this up. Reeeeeally badly. Hopefully I got a pass. I'd be delighted if I better my D2 in the mocks.

The document questions were easy enough. All about interpretation. Didn't finish my Parnell essay due to time (left it at the start and meant to go back to it)

The Cosgrave govt. question I kept going around in circles. Basically 3 paragraphs the same talking about how they restored Law and Order to the country, set up of police and Army etc.

Rise of facism in the inter war years should've been a brilliant question, but again I went around in circles talking about the Versailles treaty without giving any real dates or facts. The other question I did was the Moon Landing and McCarthyism. Did absolutley cack on that. about a page and a half at most.

Overall I thought the paper was a bitch. Not in that the questions were difficult, but they were too broad and there was no time. I knew the stuff but I didn't have time to relax and think about the question, it was just flat out writing for 3 hours. It's only when you come out and say "Oh yeah I forgot to put that in" that I realised I really cocked it up.

Attractive Nun

Kovik wrote:

I just want to point this out too: In the Dictatorship and Democracy section of the paper, a lot of you seemed to have answered the question on Stalin using the show trials. The show trials are placed in the politics and administration aspect of the course while the question cited economy and society as the perspective, meaning socialism in one country, collectivisation and reform of working conditions. The syllabus doesn't consider the show trials to be a component of social or economic history in Russia. The economic case study is the Jarrow March. There's no case study for culture in this topic and it's accepted that the show trials are meant as a surrogate for that, the Nuremburg rallies being the other political case study. So, I suppose, it's sort of a grey area.

Mind you, since they pretty much abandoned the parameters of their own syllabus, you might get away with it. But yeah, strictly speaking the question was about Stalin's social and economic agendas, of which the show trials were not a part of.

Hmm, sh!t on a swing. Forgot about that whole recognising the perspective thing. Ah well.

It is somewhat strange (as I mentioned) and personally relieving that they seem to have ignored the entire culture, religion & whatever perspective in this question. I was under the impression that they had actually guaranteed at least a question from each perspective in the topics. That seemed to be the only genuine way of breaking down the course for study. Other than that, I see no fundamental problems in the topics I covered.

With regard to the case studies, like I said I reckon the whole country (well, a few history teachers) got a bit carried away with the case study thing. And they sort of did include them in a roundabout way everywhere. The Oil Crisis, the Hungarian Uprising, the Eucharistic Congress, the Belfast bombings and both the Nuremburg Rallies and the Show Trials could vaguely, and somewhat irrelevantly in certain instances perhaps, been referred to in my topics.

EDIT: Actually, the Jarrow March could have been a key part of the question on Britain's socio-economic problems also.

GrumPy

d4gurl wrote:

u go back to ur dubes!! u are assuming so much about me just from my name!haha wel i did dat to u too grumpy!! change ur name from drogheda/meath!did u kno i was born in drogheda and lived in meath for like 5 year!??!!! woah! bye farm boy

Farm boy hehe. Just for you d4girl.

delta_bravo

Attractive Nun wrote:

Oh, and in another thread yesterday I hoped for:

1885/6 Elections (score), Easter Rising (score, sort of, I worked it into that partition question), Mussolini (ok, failure, but Stalin is a good second best), Moves towards European Unity (score)

Happy camper!

well you couldve thrown mussolini into the growth of facist regimes. so well done!