Question about History

Steve01

For the essay questions do you have to have 10 points/paragraphs for each one? I thought it was only 8 we needed and subsequently I lost a good deal of marks in the Xmas exams (still got a B so I can't honestly complain). I'm just curious if anyone knows what the marking scheme is. It is kinda unfair to think someone would get more marks for 10 ok-goodish paragraphs as opposed to someone who has 8 excellent paragraphs.

JC 2K3

10? You're way off, you only need 5. Well, when I say need I mean 5 is the minimum you need.

The marking scheme works as follows. There are 100 marks for an essay, 60 for information and 40 for presentation. For the 60 marks the examiner marks every paragraph/point you write out of 12. Therefore the minimum amount you need is 60/12 = 5. However, you could write 10 paragraphs and get an average of 6/12 for each one and get full marks or 8 and get on average of 7.5/12 for each one.

The 40 for presentation are generally easy enough to get and unless you have a severe problem writing essays the mark is generally the same percentagewise as your mark out of 60.

So there's no difference between writing 10 or 8 paragraphs as long as the 8 paragraphs are better than the 10.

Mushy

The 40 marks isnt so much for presentation, its more for overall quality of whats in the essay. As in the overall relevence.

If ya do 10 paragraphs, ya should be doing well. That'd be the most I'd do because of time. JC 2K3 explains the 60 marks perfectly. Surprised ya dont know the marking scheme at this stage

Steve01

So by the looks of it my exam was marked totally wrong. Each question in our exam was marked out of 80 with a maximum of 8 marks per paragraph (therefore 10 was essential), totally excluding the whole concept of presentation.
Like for a question on The Eucharistic Congress, how the hell could you get 10 seperate points for that? The very maximum I could get was 8, including an introduction and conclusion. I only got 2 marks for my conclusion which was the exact word-for-word conclusion given in the textbook. Urrrggghhhh... I'm just thankful this won't be the case in the Leaving Cert.

JC 2K3

^That's the old marking scheme!

Raise the issue with your teacher immediately, marking like that at this stage is not on. We had our first few essays in 5th year marked like that because the new marking scheme wasn't available yet.

Steve01

Well that clears things up a lot. Thanks for that.
The whole 'wrong marking system' issue isn't helped by the fact that the history course is so damn awkward. We'll be starting our fourth and final textbook in January though

Mushy

Only starting the 4th textbook now...eugh, thats nasty. We nearly have ours finished now. Topics 2& 3 is what our class did. Thats bad form for the teacher to be marking essays wrong at this stage...yet ya still got a B, fair play.