Examining sources: what the paper wants
The one sentence everything here is built on
- Examine sources means using historical skills to select and explain relevant evidence from material you are given.
- There are exactly three historical skills: close reading, comprehension, extracting meaning.
- Notice what is missing from that list: knowing the topic. What you already know about the context is not what is being examined, and you cannot revise for it.
- What matters 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 exam is sat online and your answers are typed. You get the set of sources on screen, a planning space that forms no part of your answer, and a response box for each question.
The instruction block tells you what to do, in advance
- The same three instructions open every 91231 paper, unchanged year after year. They are not filler. They are the three things a good answer does.
- 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 sources, but which the sources make you want to ask, belongs in the answer.
- 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. An answer with no conclusion, no question and no comment on who made the source has reported the sources back rather than examined them.
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 same five: 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 floor, not a target.
Four kinds of answer, in ascending order
- The floor — you used evidence from the sources and attempted all three questions. What holds an answer here is relying on the sources alone without ever drawing a conclusion.
- The next step — you answered in your own words first and then used the source as support. This is the single biggest difference between one script and the next, and it is a matter of sentence order, not of extra knowledge.
- The top — 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.
- Below the floor there are three recurring causes, and all three are self-inflicted: copying from the sources without examining them, writing a minimal response, and not attempting all three questions.
Three questions of equal weight
- Each question carries exactly the same weight. There is no long one and no short one.
- So the arithmetic matters more here than in any other History paper. Three solid answers beat one brilliant answer and one blank, and it is not close.
- Divide the writing time in three and move when the time is up, whether or not the answer feels finished.
Worked Example
A source in the set 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?
"Source C says that 'the meeting was disorderly and the resolution was carried by nine votes to four'. Source D says that a ratepayer wrote to the paper to complain. This shows there was opposition."
Improve it without adding any new information.
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: