Sample Answer for Paper 2

Guide to AQA English Literature GCSE Paper 2

Exam Overview

• Duration: 2 hours 15 minutes
• Weight: 60% of your English Literature GCSE
• Total Marks: 96

Assessment Objectives (AOs)

Paper 2 uses the same AOs as Paper 1 to evaluate how well you have written your essay. Head to the page "Paper 1" to see what you need to be doing!

Introduction to Paper 2

Section A of Paper 1 is worth 34 marks. These extra 4 marks are for SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar). You will be given a choice of two questions to answer, but make sure that you only write about the text your school covers. Spend around 45-50 minutes on this section and leave yourself enough time to plan. This will help to ensure that your essay isn't unstructured.

Section B is worth 30 marks. You will answer a question comparing a poem from your anthology that is given to you in the exam, with a poem from you anthology of your choice. You should spend around 45 minutes on this section, and again make sure you plan!

Section C is worth 32 marks and you're only assessed on AO1 and AO2 as you would have never seen this poem before. There are 2 questions in this section

1. Worth 24 marks (35 minutes). You must write an essay analysing an unseen poem.

2. Worth 8 marks (10 minutes). You will be asked to compare this poem to the first unseen poem that you just wrote about.