history aqa HIS1A - crusades

Oh I hope so as well. I felt sorry for the people who did that since I knew they did know their stuff and studied hard. The problem with the castles question was that it asked how they are used to defend and many could have missed the 'defend' part and wrote what castles were generally used for. Examples would have been a bit difficult. The examiners will hopefully be more sympathetic as they know many won't choose that question and they tend to be a little bit softer on those ones and harder on popular questions.
I also found that it was usually 53-55-ish which also surprised me. You have to remember however that it's hard to get completely full marks and you might lose quite a few so it's pretty decent. If you know your stuff, you should be able to do well so I think it's fair enough. They're probably low since the crusades topic is quite a challenging one - it requires you to know a lot of background knowledge so you could understand the actual events

Yeah thats what I thought, what questions did you pick??

Btw - does anyone remember what the 12 marker was the 2nd section (which went with 24 mrk castles)? It's been really bugging me since I couldn't remember it when people asked me

Argh! I did the castles question because we'd gone through it in lessons before but I linked it with castles being used for defence, symbol of power but then said that military orders were more useful
Honestly don't know if that was right but I knew examples like Kerak, Jacob's Ford and Belvoir so hoping I'll get brownie points.
Was so annoyed the Fourth Crusade didn't come up, ah well, it may do in the re-sit!!

I did the first and third crusade, I didn't even revise castles! I can't see how they are so significant to write a 24 marker on

It was explain the lack of outsider help for the Outremer between the third and fourth crusade, I think- the exam is just a haze now!!

yeah and it only allowed you to talk about castles rather than most 24a which allow you to bring in your own point's, if it said were castles the most important in the defense of outremer it would have been fairer as you could bring in the barons and the orders

Btw - does anyone remember what the 12 marker was the 2nd section (which went with 24 mrk castles)? It's been really bugging me since I couldn't remember it when people asked me

It was something like why did outremer not recieve much help between the second and third crusade

Yep. A pretty unusual 24 marker. To be fair though, the first crusade 24 marker was also something I've never seen before since it was about why people went on the crusade (which usually came up as 12 markers in the past). Thankfully there are so many reasons and examples that it was enough to fill in as a 24 marker

Yeah it is normally a 12 marker but has come up as a 24 marker twice before , one example was ' 'was spiritual benefits the biggest motivation for participants on the first crusade''

Oh maybe I just forgot or something haha. Well either way it would make sense for it to be a 24 marker with the amount of detail that topic has. I was really hoping that a question would come up on the reasons of why people went on the first crusade since there is so much to say - lucky year, this is! Wasn't last year's exam also easy? I was worried that it would mean this year's exam would be harder...

Yeah the previous exam was said to be one of the easiest exams , so I also thought this one would be harder , but I still think this exam was considered to be hard compared to quite a few others

I am resitting from 2 years ago! Hopefully the fourth crusade comes up!

How did you find it? Fourth crusade was on there aha lucky you! I didnt do that question though. Thought the first set was a gift! But found the second ones a bit harder because I wasn't too strong on the fourth crusade or the military orders!

the the questions were literally my dream for the fourth crusade as I revised the **** out of it due to it being smaller in content than the others and I found it a bit easier to talk about than the second crusade which is my least favourite. I would have gone for the second set if questions but I didn't like the 12 marker although the collapse of the states due to the succession crisis looked good. How did you find the paper? Hopefully the grade boundaries will be low because from what I heard outside the exam hall people were hating the questions