For many students, reading about revision is a bit like a lazy cook reading cookery books. The books are great to read and inspire lots of good intentions, but when the time comes, they are ignored in preference for the old convenient ways. For our cook, this amounts to sticking a ready meal in the microwave (or worse, reaching for the dreaded pot noodles), and for our student revising for exams, it amounts to a bit of cramming the week or so before the exam. If you identify yourself as one of these people, you have a choice: read on and learn some-thing useful or skip this section and go straight to the next section on answering examination questions.
A-level psychology examinations — like all examinations at this level — are carefully crafted to assess specific skills in specific topic areas. When I first started marking A-level psychology papers over 30 years ago, examination questions used to be far more general e.g. ‘Write an essay on Freud’. Mark schemes were equally general, with comments like ‘A pleasure to read’ being a criterion for a mark in the top mark band. Students nowadays are plagued by the need for critical skills (AO2), but these were not even required 30 years ago, although they were appreciated (‘A little bit of evaluation would be nice’ forming part of one mark scheme I remember).
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