In AQA exams, extended response questions carry a lot of marks. In ordinary language, ‘extended response questions’ are called ‘essays’. In the first 4 years of the current specification (2017–2020), AQA has set a total of six 16-mark essays each year across the three A-level papers (plus three or four of the 8-mark essays). This represents more than one third of your total mark.
Essays often fill students with dread. Perhaps this is because, in subjects such as English, essays take a long time to write (often an hour in exams) and require a lot of thought and organisation. Indeed, this is why they are used as a form of assessment — in English and in psychology. If you want to do well, you need to be able to cope with them. In psychology, essays are much shorter affairs. Given that there are 96 marks available in 2 hours per paper, you should expect to spend around 20 minutes on a 16-mark answer.
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