Part (c): the evaluation
Why this part decides your grade
- The standard's Excellence criterion says nothing about skills. Achieved asks you to select and use skills; Merit adds with precision; Excellence asks only for analysis with insight.
- So the skills strand tops out at Merit, and no amount of precision in parts (a) and (b) can reach Excellence.
- Part (c) is where insight is available, and in every year checked it has carried an evaluative verb: evaluate the geographic impacts, evaluate the consequences, how sustainable is this likely to be, what is the most significant impact — justify your response.
- The paper's own instructions say the earlier parts build the understanding this one needs. They are a warm-up with marks attached, not the main event.
- Leave time. Ten minutes of part (c) is worth more than ten more minutes of part (a), and this is the single most useful piece of exam technique in the standard.
What an evaluative verb requires
- Evaluate = weigh something against something else and reach a judgement you can defend. It is not a list of impacts.
- Justify = give reasons for a choice and say why the alternatives are weaker. A case for your own answer alone is only half of it.
- How sustainable = sustainable for whom, and over what period. Both halves are required, and an answer that gives neither is not evaluating.
- Most significant = you must state your criterion for significance before you apply it. Number of people affected? Reversibility? Cost? Speed of onset? Different criteria give different answers, and saying so is itself insight.
- Every one of these verbs needs a conclusion. Not a summary — a position, reached from the evidence, that could have come out differently.
A structure that works for any part (c)
- State your criterion or your position in the first sentence. Markers should not have to wait for it.
- Bring evidence from at least three resources, integrated inside the argument rather than listed.
- Apply a concept — usually sustainability, change, interaction or perspectives — as the organising idea, not as a label.
- Deal with the strongest alternative honestly. Say what would follow if it were right, and why the evidence favours your reading instead.
- Reach a conclusion and state its limits. This holds while X remains true; if Y changed, the answer would change.
Evaluating sustainability properly
- The definition is supplied: meeting present needs without preventing future generations from meeting theirs.
- Ask three questions of it: sustainable for whom? Over what timeframe? On what evidence — a trend that continues, a resource that depletes, a system that recovers?
- Refuse the yes/no framing where the evidence supports something better. In the invented Sarupa delta, the honest answer is that the current arrangement is sustainable for the city and not for the delta — and the city is inside the delta.
- Use rates, not totals. Subsidence of 66 mm a year against a mean ground level barely above high water says more about the future than 2.3 m since 1990.
- Name what would have to change for the answer to be different. That is what turns an opinion into an evaluation.
Evaluating impacts, and choosing the most significant
- The papers repeatedly use the categories environmental, social, economic and cultural. Use them as a planning frame so you cover the ground, then argue across them.
- Significance needs a stated criterion, and there are at least four reasonable ones:
- how many people are affected
- how reversible the impact is
- how fast it arrives
- whether it forecloses other options
- The strongest answers show that the choice of criterion changes the answer. In the invented delta, number of people selects flooding of the city; reversibility selects the subsidence, because compacted sediment does not re-expand; foreclosing options selects the loss of the mangrove fringe, because it removed a defence that would otherwise still exist.
- Then commit. Having shown that the criterion matters, choose one, justify it, and give the answer it produces. Refusing to choose is not balance; it is an unfinished evaluation.
Worked Example
Worked example
Part (c): "The Sarupa delta cannot continue as it is." Evaluate this statement, using evidence from the resources.
Answer:
Step 1 — take a position in the first sentence, and make it more precise than the statement.
The statement is true but badly aimed: it is not the delta that cannot continue as it is, it is the city's current relationship with it — and the distinction decides what any response should try to do.
Step 2 — set out the evidence that supports the statement, integrated.
Subsidence in the northern districts of Teluk has reached 2.3 m since 1990 and is still accelerating, at an average of about 66 mm a year. The embankment in the photograph was built to a height set before that ground fell, so a defence of fixed height now protects against a smaller and smaller event. Population rose from 0.5 to 1.9 million over the same period, which is what drove the extraction responsible for most of the settlement. On these three figures alone, the present arrangement clearly cannot persist.
Step 3 — identify what the statement gets wrong, which is where the analysis is.
The delta itself is not ending. It receives sediment, it compacts, and it has done both for as long as it has existed — the 0.6 m recorded beneath the uninhabited ponds is that natural process, and it is slow and self-limiting. What cannot continue is a city extracting groundwater from beneath itself while defending a fixed line. Those are different problems with different answers.
Step 4 — evaluate against the alternative reading.
If the statement were read as the delta is failing, the logical response would be engineering: raise the embankment, extend it, hold the line. But the evidence argues against that. Raising a wall on ground that is falling at 66 mm a year buys time proportional to the height added, while the extraction that causes the fall continues beneath it — and the population data show the city is already responding differently, by relocating inland along the old levee rather than by defending the oldest districts. The revealed answer on the ground is retreat, not defence.
Step 5 — apply sustainability with both halves of the question answered.
Sustainable for whom? The inland districts, for decades. The oldest coastal districts, no — they are already being abandoned. The pond operators outside the embankment, least of all, since they cannot relocate a pond inland. Over what timeframe? At current rates, another 1 m of subsidence in roughly 15 years, which is within the working life of most infrastructure now being built.
Step 6 — conclude, and state the limit.
So the statement should be accepted with a correction: the delta will continue; the present distribution of people and defences within it will not. That conclusion holds while extraction remains the dominant driver — the 0.6 m under the ponds against 2.3 m under the city is the evidence that it does. If extraction were reduced to the point where the natural rate dominated, the argument would change completely, because the natural process is self-limiting and the ground would eventually stabilise.