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AQA AS orals

Did a few AS oral re-sits today with Upper Sixth students. First go at these, as we had a visiting examiner last year. I must say I found the format quite enjoyable, if a bit rushed. Three minutes per topic is brief, but good candidates can still say a lot. You have to concentrate hard to make sure you cover the correct topics, but you end up with some good conversations, considerably more natural and improvised than the format we previously had with the OCR (very stilted role-play lacking in authenticity and memorised presentations with semi-memorised answers in the conversation.)

So, all in all, AQA have done well on this, though I did feel that it might be better to cover fewer topics, with more time spent on each. Just hope that my students get the marks they deserve.

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