Alevel Religious Studies (OCR) Help!

Hi, what is the best way to revise Alevel RS? I use this website a lot (https://alevelphilosophyandreligion.com/ocr-religious-studies/) as well as booklets and stuff from my teacher. I thought I'd try and put them together and write up notes but my biggest problem is I'm just not sure how to approach the essays - some of the questions seem to be so specific! Is there a way I can make sure I am prepared to answer any question to a good degree in only 40 minutes? I try to revise with the exams in mind but I would like some advice on how best to do this - should I be doing practice essays or plans or ???

Finally on the spec there are usually 4 or so points that say something like "A02 relating to.." with a few point laid out. Are the questions we could be given only based on those points or could they be about any little thing in the topic? If so it would be not too difficult to prepare essays around these points but if not I don't even know where to start!
Sorry for the bad english and thanks :smile:

Reply 1

Joe312

Original post by elizarose06

Glad u like the website!

It's hard to really properly explain this in a post - but what you need to realise is that although yes, you can be set very specific questions - nonetheless, you can use other content from the topic to answer those questions.

E.g.: "How convincing is Aristotle's prime mover?" [40]

In my set of notes here are the key most important paragraphs:

Plato's rationalism (inc. cave & world of forms)
Plato's hierarchy of forms
Aristotle's four causes
Aristotle's prime mover.

Now of course you have to start with the primer mover - and since that's the focus of the question you need to do full AO1 for that question.

You're probably wondering what you do next. Well, the prime mover is the final cause of the universe. As an idea it flows from Aristotle's theory of the four causes. So evaluating the four causes is relevant to evaluating the prime mover.

Then, you can do the plato's rationalism & cave paragraph .Just remember not to do much AO1 for that paragraph - do not go overboard with the explanation of the cave etc, for example. The AO1 marks for the question are only for Aristotle's prime mover, so you are only bringing up Plato to help you evaluate Aristotle's prime mover because Plato would disagree both with it and the underlying empirical method Aristotle used to come up with the idea.

I've designed the notes so that they can answer any question. So if a question seems specific, just ask yourself what the other paragraph content would say about the question - then make sure to introduce the relevance of that when starting the paragraph.

Yes you, can get questions on the discussion points on the spec or on any small thing on the spec. But that's fine once you realise and start practicing fitting content from the rest of the topic onto that small thing - by asking yourself whether it would agree or disagree.

I've tried to make a full list of possible exam questions here but I've probably missed a few out:

https://alevelphilosophyandreligion.com/ocr-religious-studies/list-of-exam-questions-for-ocr/