How to best prepare for your QCAA Modern History Exam

Breaking down the Assessment

This exam assesses your application of a range of cognitions to unseen questions in response to historical sources. Your exam will be made up of several short items requiring paragraph responses that include references to historical evidence and sources.

You will be given up to 12 unseen sources with 2 hours of working time and 15 minutes of planning time. The historical sources will be spread across 3 to 5 questions. For the exam, you are not allowed to bring in any notes, quotes or extra materials outside of your pens.

The ISMG is spread across 5 criteria – Comprehending 25%, Analysing 20%, Synthesising 20%, Evaluating 25% and Creating and Communicating 10%.

Where do I start?

Understanding the Context

It is pivotal to understand the topic and period the exam covers as it will greatly assist you when answering questions. A deep understanding of the historical context allows you to utilise discerning words and deeply analyse, evaluate and synthesise to a high standard for the top marks.

To help assist you in understanding the historical context of the time there are a couple of different revision techniques you can employ.

1. Watching online recaps helps you contextualise the entirety of the topic and have different perspectives on the specific topic and/or overarching question.
2. I recommend taking a look at the “Senior Modern History for Queensland” Cambridge book that provides an immense number of resources, information and activities to help you with historical understanding.
3. Compiling a list of key terms and individuals will help you connect the dots for your understanding and provide an easy place to access information if you do forget something/someone’s involvement in a specific topic.
4. Drawing up a timeline of the period and important events that occurred gives you a quick summary and helps contextualise events. This is particularly useful when looking at historical sources and their relevance to specific questions as things change as time goes on for many topics.

These ideas provide examples of how to solidify your understanding and don’t have to be copied exactly, whatever works for you may not work for your friends. It is important to utilise whatever tool for YOU to achieve the best mark possible.

Writing your Paragraphs

Each question will require a unique cognition - analyse, evaluate and synthesise. There are specific language choices that will point out which cognition a question requires you to employ. For each question, it is important to read the instructions of your exam clearly as they provide instructions as to what sources relate to which question and specific instructions regarding the question (e.g 1 similarity and 2 differences)

Comprehend

Comprehending is assessed across the paper. It requires you to identify, explain and/or use relevant terms or concepts in a historical context with an understanding of relevant issues from sources. This is where your list of key terms, events and individuals will come in handy.

Analyse

This section requires you to analyse features of evidence in historical sources. The examiner may ask you to identify and examine features of evidence from a source or sources. Also, they may ask you to identify similarities and differences across sources.

• Signpost your response to demonstrate that you are addressing the question requirement/s (e.g. First similarity is).
• Even if you are only asked to identify a feature of evidence, explain using evidence from the source and/or context statement.
• If you are asked to “compare”, this means you should identify and explain a similarity and difference, you can split these into 2 paragraphs to make it extra clear for the marker.

Evaluate

This involves evaluating the usefulness and reliability of sources and the extent to which they corroborate. This means making judgements about reliability and usefulness using well-chosen evidence. They may be a statement or question to respond to and specifically require historical knowledge to see where the source came from and what factors may have influenced its creation. This section can be further categorised into usefulness and reliability.

• Reliability – Outside the source
  • Aim to make discerning judgements.
    • Informed by insight into a range of factors.
  • Use material from the context statement, source title and source details to then comment on how the factors enhance or limit the reliability of the source.
  • Use as many features of evidence as possible from the context statement and the source to back your judgement (integrate analysis statements for top marks in evaluating).
  • Should be framed in degrees rather than absolutes (e.g. reliable to a great extent).
• Usefulness – Inside the Source
  • Aim to make discerning judgements.
    • Informed by insight into a range of factors
  • Should be tied to the question or statement of the overall question.
  • Consider the relevance, significance of the perspective and implications of the evidence in the source for answering the question or responding to the statement.

There are two main ways to structure your response. Firstly, go source-by-source judging the usefulness and reliability of each source. Secondly, by evaluation aspect, starting with usefulness or reliability and then making a judgement for each source at a time.

Synthesis

This requires a skilful combination of evidence from a range of sources to create and support a sophisticated argument. Your mark in this section comes from a sophisticated argument, a combination of sources, the use of historical terms and clear communication. 

• If sources are specified by the question, ensure to engage with all of them.
• The skilful combination looks to value finding patterns and connections across sources.
• Make passing evaluative comments to strengthen your ideas/choices, but do not go on long digressions about reliability and usefulness.
•  Use historical terms throughout.
• Break up your response into short paragraphs, but do not fall into the trap of surveying sources without combining and arguing them.

You can ask some questions yourself to improve your synthesis, these include and are not limited to:

• Is the relationship between sources made clear?
• Are connectives/cohesive ties used to link different sources (e.g. corroborates, in addition, furthermore, in contrast)?
•  Does the connective/cohesive tie accurately represent the point you want to make?
• Is there a balance between evidence from sources and your analysis/interpretation of the source?

Creating and Communicating

• Organise your paragraph or paragraphs succinctly and purposefully around a central idea.
• Use the question structure as a guide for other question types.
• Use spelling, grammar and punctuation proficiently.
• Acknowledge sources used appropriately, e.g. The cartoon (Source 2) shows.

This is marked across your entire paper on the criteria.

Each of the above sections is pivotal to your grade for this assessment. Therefore, understanding and knowing how to do well in each section will go a long way to achieving your desired mark.

Breaking down your mock exam results

This section assumes that you’ve received your mock exam results and looking to best use that experience to enhance your results for the external exam.

The actual mark you receive doesn’t matter and comparing to others won’t help either. In most cases, you had little to no time to prepare for them and it’s just seeing your current paragraph writing ability. Further, the mock exam is also an example of what your teachers think and what kind of questions may be on your external exam and more so for you to see which section of the ISMG you may need more assistance/revision in.

 Your mock exam will also personally help you with:

1. The format of the exam (choosing your text, writing in the lines, etc).
2. Timing
3. The pressure of sitting in the hall.
4. Getting comfortable with seeing a question you may not know how to answer straight away.

After receiving your mock exam papers, it’s important to try identifying what specific writing skills you may have had trouble with and then work on them. This could include practice analysing sentences, stepping through different evidence in your synthesis and/or utilising more historical terms.

It’s almost guaranteed that you will do better in your external exams than your mocks if you do targeted writing practice and take on feedback given by your teachers.

Final Tips and Tricks

Managing Planning Time

Read and highlight all sources, this includes the context and references for all of them. Identify any key terms or concepts. Write which question each source is allocated to, and relevant cognition. This time can be utilised to annotate your sources too what they show and potentially how they can be used.

I also like to take a few deep breaths as the count goes down for planning time and just before writing time commences. This helps keep me calm and my heart rate, allowing me to think clearly.

Edit your work if you have time left.

My teacher always told me “Great writing starts with great editing” which involves “choosing the best word for the best place” in your essay. This will greatly assist in increasing your writing in every criterion of the ISMG.

Ensure you answered every part of every question and were sign-posted your paragraphs.

There may be a unique number of “things” you have to identify (similarities, corroborations, reliability, etc), so make sure you tick off everything the question is asking you for. By sign-posting your paragraphs it makes yourself extra clear to the marker.

 FAQs

How much is the external exam worth?

The modern history external is worth 25% of your overall score for modern history.

How should I allocate my time for each question?

This depends on how many questions you are given and the number of sources for each question. Also, the number of marks each question is worth will be given to you. During your planning time, it may be a good idea to allocate a duration for each question.

Want more personalized study guidance to help drastically improve your marks? A private tutor can make the biggest difference!

Written by KIS Academics Tutor for QCE Specialist Mathematics and Mathematical Methods, Ragulan Gnanavel. Ragulan is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Actuarial Studies and a Bachelor of Commerce at UNSW. He has outstanding credentials as a tutor, and you can view Ragulan’s profile here and request him as a tutor.