AQA AS sociology today- how did it go?

I did Families and Households and Education, and I thought both were really nice papers :biggrin:

Question e for family was the exact same question I did as a practice last week and got my teacher to mark! Talk about luck! It gave me the confidence boost I needed, since I was feeling pretty depressed after screwing up English :frown:

What did everyone else think?

Reply 1

*starry_eyed_*

i did them units as well and thought they were a lot better than i was expecting! finished the first paper when sumone said "stop" so that was great timing. my second paper i stuffed up a bit on the last essay questyion.. .couldn't decide what i wanted to write about!

Reply 2

tis_me_lord

Education went well. :smile:

Reply 3

I alredy did family in Jan... Education was great.

For the question about functions of education for the individual.. i wrote about the history of ed.. the introduction of ed.. and reasons why it was introduced and how the effected ppl then i wrote the functionalsits marxists and paul willis views.. does anyone know if this is right ? im really scared i messed up =( especially on the last question.. all i wrote about was cultural ads and cultural dis ads at school and at home. Eeek

Sorry to be a pain !

Reply 4

lostinfantasies

I can't remember specifically what I wrote for that functions of education essay, but I remember I included Bowles & Gintis (Correspondence Principle), and a lot of Marxist/Functionalist views. Can't think whether I went into Paul Willis or not...I remember I wrote his name though, and went into his study. May have been for revision/practice tests, or in a different question.

For the final question I remember I went into material/cultural deprivation, how the idea that working-class pupils and their under-achievement because of home life didn't explain why some middle-class pupils failed/why some working-class pupils succeeded. I'm glad I put a lot of key points in, and analysed/expanded to the best I could :smile:

.

A plan is your friend :smile:

. Found that I'm now in a system where I look at the essay questions first, write a plan of key points, and then start on the questions worth 2, 4 6 and 8 marks. That way, I would have already had down the key points, fresh from last minute revision minutes before the exam, and I only need to add to it (found I can add points and reasons if I read through my plan) or expand on it all for my essay.

Reply 5

tis_me_lord

I don't do plans, diving in works for me. :p:

For functions I started staying structural and consensus vs critical etc... but that's my intro to most things. :rolleyes:

Then I basically did an essay on functionalists with some marxism thrown in between. I started with GAIL, then did Durkheim with evaluation, then Parsons, and compared with Bowles and Gintis a lot. Then Davis and Moore for a sentence, then Hargreaves who evaluates functionalists and looked at the 1998 Act to see if that had made it better. It some ways it had, some way it made it worse. Talked about community schools and the literacy and numeracy hour to evaluate how integrated we really are.

Finished with some blabber about functionalists happy vs marxists unhappy vs feminists unhappy for other reasons.

The next one I used the item quite a lot, but knew who had studies what it mentioned which helped. So I used Hyman, Willis, Douglas, Boudon, Bourdieu, Bernstein, Sugarman in detail. Then a brief history of education paragraph, and then interactionalists and briefly did becker, cicourel and kitsuse, keddie, labov, rist, fuller and rosenthal and jacobsen.

Then said something about compensatory education... since the item referred to that, and I said throwing money at it might not elimate the problem if it's engraved into the culture at home. But then excellence in cities tries to help parents too.

Then concluded saying it's a big factor, but so's the history and what goes on in the classroom.

The 2,4,6,8 was fine. For the 6 mark ethocentric thing I said stuf like languages are always european languages etc... was that right?

Reply 6

Lollirot

ha, I thought I'd done quite well until I read the above posts. lol. Wel what I wrote was right, just different. :smile:

I never thought about the languages thing for the ethnocentric thing, it's a good point. I said things like history lessons teach mainly British history, not giving thought to different people's religious needs...e.g.praying, uniforms not allowing different cultures to where what their culture believes they should ( i know that's not always true, I just couldn't think of another point :frown:

) I think that question wasn't my best...
The essays I found ok though, so it could've gone worse! I just want to know my results now, but I'll just have to wait. :frown:

Reply 7

kellywood_5

eblurvesu

For the functions one, I just wrote about all the perspectives; functionalism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and interactionism. For the class one, I talked about in-school and out-of-school factors; streaming, ideal pupil, halo effect, unequal access to classroom knowledge, cultural capital, restricted code, positional theory and some other stuff I can't remember.

Reply 8

kellywood_5

tis_me_lord

The 2,4,6,8 was fine. For the 6 mark ethocentric thing I said stuf like languages are always european languages etc... was that right?

I said about languages being European as well. My other 2 were Christian assemblies and Coard (1981) saying that black culture, art and music are ignored.

Reply 9

tis_me_lord

kellywood_5

I said about languages being European as well. My other 2 were Christian assemblies and Coard (1981) saying that black culture, art and music are ignored.

MacNeil gave 3 examples, so I used all 3 of his.

Lanuage, literature, history.

Reply 10

StarBlueUK

Good thanks. Blagged through question on functions of education though after briefly outlining functionalist and marxist ideas. Oddly, found education easier than family, even though we weren't taught as much on education.

Reply 11

lol it feels like everyone here is smarter than me

Reply 12

HeHe

i got an A in AS Sociology, i thought i was going to get a B. lol i had 77 marks in families and households paper,in the education paper i had 100/105 marks in that paper. also my coursework was marked by an examiner had A in it but examiner marked me down for 77! still didn't matter as i got an A.