Just over 3,000 students sat one of the new OCR AS examinations in sociology in January 2009, and the vast majority of these were entered for Unit 1 (G671): Exploring Socialisation, Culture and Identity. Overall, there was a great variation in performance across both examination papers, with a noticeable difference between the high-achieving candidates, who understood, interpreted and evaluated sociological evidence with clarity and accuracy, and the low-achieving candidates, whose answers contained anecdotal and asociological material with assertive evaluative commentary. Sociological evidence includes concepts, studies, empirical data, theories and relevant contemporary examples, and candidates need to be encouraged to use a range of these in order to reach the top-level mark bands.
Overall, candidates performed at a reasonable level, given the new specification content and a different mode of assessment through the use of pre-release material. The vast majority of candidates answered all four questions and were aware of which assessment objectives were being targeted in each question part.
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