Paper 2 guide (AQA GCSE English Literature): Model Answers
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
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Worth 24 marks (35 minutes). You must write an essay analysing an unseen poem.
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Worth 8 marks (10 minutes). You will be asked to compare this poem to the first unseen poem that you just wrote about.
For a guide on how to answer each type of question, head to the pages "The Poetry Anthology" "Unseen Poetry" and "Modern Texts"