WJEC Economics AS

Oh dearrrrrrrrr! It went soooooooooo badly. Especially the data response! Anyone else do it??

Yeh, the data response was the real nasty one out of the three. My hand felt like it was gonna fall off by the end of it all, especially having had 3hrs of phys in the morning.

Reply 2

tristanperry

It wasn't too bad. I thought that EC1 was easy as usual, EC2 was pretty hard (we never really practise data responses!) and EC3 had some hard essays, but also there were 2-3 okay-ish ones to write about.

I ended up pretty confident and pleased about EC1 and EC3 :smile:

However the two ending 8 mark question on EC2 were a bit odd.. to be honest, I wasn't too sure what they were looking for! Plus they just said "Using the data, explain..." - there wasn't much too the data/article really, it was pretty much:

'Japan's economy is growing - due to consumer spending and investment.

The exchange rate sucks.

We cannot use fiscal policy yet otherwise it'd mess up our economy'

- so I found it a bit tricky to write much based on that!

Although apart from that, it was a pretty nice paper IMHO :smile:

Reply 3

RevisionIsSoNotFun

OP

Yes!! That's exactly what I thought - that it said for almost every question "With the aid of the data..." and we didn't really have much data. There was like 1 figure and the rest wasn't really "useable" if you see what I mean. Yeah I thought the last two questions were a bit...hmmmmm. As I was writing it I had no idea if it was right.

I agree that EC1 and EC3 were ok. Apart from the question on congestion charge. Didn't really know how to use "economic analysis" for that?!

Reply 4

prach_pan

1

The data response was awful!
How do they expect us to 'use the data' for every single question!?

How did you everyone answer these questions?

- What are 'monetary tightening' and 'fiscal tightening'?
- What is likely to follow if the Japanese economy continue to have economic growth? (8 marks)

Reply 5

tristanperry

RevisionIsSoNotFun

Yes!! That's exactly what I thought - that it said for almost every question "With the aid of the data..." and we didn't really have much data. There was like 1 figure and the rest wasn't really "useable" if you see what I mean. Yeah I thought the last two questions were a bit...hmmmmm. As I was writing it I had no idea if it was right.

I agree that EC1 and EC3 were ok. Apart from the question on congestion charge. Didn't really know how to use "economic analysis" for that?!

*Nods* EC2 just seemed a stupid paper - I was thinking that all the way through TBH! :smile:

Figure 1 was sort of useful... although it still didn't mean too much (i.e. "The yen is depreciating, meaning cheaper exports and dearer imports for the Japanese" - oh, now that's helpful.. lol!)

The congestion charge one was a bit odd. The question seemed a bit vague. All I did was mention the graphs, mentioned market failure/negative externalities, and how the demand for roads is inelastic. I'm sure that most of what I written for that answer was rubbish, although I'm bound to get some marks for it :P

prach_pan

The data response was awful!
How do they expect us to 'use the data' for every single question!?

How did you everyone answer these questions?

- What are 'monetary tightening' and 'fiscal tightening'?
- What is likely to follow if the Japanese economy continue to have economic growth? (8 marks)

Hopefully they'll just mark up the data responses or something!

1)What are 'monetary tightening' and 'fiscal tightening'?
- I pretty much said here that "tightening" meant using a policy more. Hence "monetary tightening" means changing int. rates as required (and so on). Seemed a bit odd, though!

2) What is likely to follow if the Japanese economy continue to have economic
- This was an 8 marker, right? I didn't have too much idea really. I just said that economic growth could lower unemployment, however it'd also lead to price inflation.

Worth maybe 3 marks :P

Reply 6

Eternity Forever

12

Overall, I found the entire exam quite good. I hated the last question on EC2.What questions did you guys answer for EC3? I did question 4 and question 6. Question 6 was 95% similar to one of the past papers, I was quite shocked when it said "Explain the benefits of free trade" and I had done the question about 3 times in the past papers. When Robert Nutter (Chief examiner for WJEC economics) came to our college, he said the EC3 questions are predictable, so I just prepared for the ones I was most confident on...and they came up..And he kept emphasing how data should be used in each question in EC2, I just kept throwing numbers in there from the text, just for the sake of "using the data".. One thing I was greatfull for was the fact that there wasn't much to read for EC2, had a bit of a headache and my hand was killing me!!!

Reply 7

tristanperry

Yeah it was a pretty nice paper :smile:

There was nothing too unpredictable on EC1, and EC3 had some nice essays. However I still think that EC2 was badly planned/written.

Anywhoo, I did questions 2 and 6 on EC3 :smile:

Looking at it now, I think I'd have done better with doing question 4 rather than question 2, although I feel confident with what I had written :smile:

Although I looked at questions 1 and 3 and thought: "how could you get more than 3 marks here?" There seemed like they had little to write about. Especially Qu 3)a):

Why can banks using credit lead to a rise in the money supply? [10]
-seriously? 10 marks? Well credit means money that's borrowed out without it actually existing. Erm.. that's gotta be good for 1, maybe 2, marks? What about the other 8 marks?

WJEC Economics AS

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