What AS91231 asks you to do
The one sentence the standard is built on
- Examine sources means using historical skills to select and explain relevant evidence from material you are given.
- The standard names the historical skills exactly: close reading, comprehension, extracting meaning.
- Notice what is missing from that list: knowing the topic. You are not assessed on what you already know about the context, and you cannot revise for it.
- What you are assessed on is what you do with a page of text you have never seen before, and that is a skill you can drill until it is automatic.
The instruction block is an advance mark scheme
- The same three instructions are printed on the front of every 91231 paper, unchanged year after year. They are not filler. They are the three things markers are told to look for.
- Go beyond the immediately obvious information in the sources, in order to draw conclusions. Repeating what a source says is comprehension. Working out what it shows is examining.
- Note relevant questions the sources might raise in a historian's mind, that may be investigated further. A question you cannot answer from the booklet, but which the booklet makes you want to ask, is worth marks.
- Consider who created the source, and for what purpose. Every source was made by someone, for someone, for a reason. Those three facts change what the source can be trusted to tell you.
- Treat these as a checklist you run over every answer before moving on. If an answer contains no conclusion, no question and no comment on who made the source, it is sitting at Achieved.
The three questions, and what each one is really testing
- Question One is comprehension and cause, over an early block of sources. Recent papers asked why a movement was established, what the purpose of an Act was, and what the reasons behind a decision were.
- It is answerable from the Introduction plus the named sources. Read the Introduction first — it exists to make Question One answerable.
- Question Two is a concept question, over a later block. Recent papers asked about change and continuity, about perspectives, and about differences between two groups.
- The concept is always one of the five the standard names: perspectives; reliability and bias; continuity and change; intent and motivation; cause and effect.
- Question Three is always about the sources themselves. Recent papers asked how reliable one source is, how useful two sources are, and required corroboration — checking a source against others.
- Every question tells you the minimum number of sources, and it is always TWO. Two is the threshold for a pass mark on that question, not a target for a good one.
What the grades actually look like
- Achieved — you used evidence from the sources, and you attempted all three questions. The usual limit at this grade is relying on the sources alone without drawing any conclusion.
- Merit — you answered in your own words first and then used the source as support. This is the single most reported difference between Achieved and Merit scripts, and it is a matter of sentence order, not of extra knowledge.
- Excellence — you used a wide range of the sources, corroborated them against each other, judged reliability accurately, and offered insight that went beyond the material, sometimes drawing on what you already know of the period.
- Not Achieved — the reports name three causes every year: copying from the booklet without examining it, writing a minimal response, and not attempting all three questions.
How the marks are counted
- Each question is marked on the 8-point scale used across NCEA externals: N0, N1, N2, A3, A4, M5, M6, E7, E8.
- Three questions give a paper mark out of 24. In 2025 the cut scores were Not Achieved 0–7, Achieved 8–13, Merit 14–18, Excellence 19–24.
- The arithmetic matters more here than in any other History paper. Three solid Merit answers beat one Excellence answer and one blank, and it is not close.
Worked Example
Worked example
A source in the booklet is a newspaper report of a council meeting. Here is a candidate's whole answer to Why did opposition to women standing for the council grow after 1906?
Improve it to a Merit answer without adding any new information.
Answer:
Step 1 — find what the answer is missing. It contains two accurate quotes and no claim of the candidate's own. The final sentence, this shows there was opposition, restates the question rather than answering it. Nothing here is wrong; it is simply comprehension.
Step 2 — write the candidate's own sentence first. The evidence supports a claim, so state the claim: opposition grew because the council vote made the issue real rather than theoretical, which brought ratepayers who had not previously engaged into the argument.
Step 3 — attach each piece of evidence to a part of that claim. The nine-to-four vote shows the question had moved from discussion to decision. The letter to the editor shows the argument spreading outside the council chamber.
Step 4 — add the element that lifts it. Note who created the source and why: a letter to the editor is written to be published and to persuade, so it is strong evidence that an argument was being made in public, and weak evidence for how many people agreed with it.
The rewritten answer: