Of all the questions on Paper 1, Question 4 is the one where a small misjudgement does the most damage. It carries 20 marks, so a rushed or misdirected answer can pull a whole grade down, and yet it tends to arrive at the point in the exam when your energy and your time are both running low. Many students reach it with far fewer minutes than they planned, then write a hurried page that never gets going.
The question itself also invites some odd habits. It hands you a comment from a student and asks to what extent you agree, and that framing leads people to treat the characters like real people, to write about their feelings and lives, or to argue with the statement as though this were a debate. Those answers read well as opinion pieces but do not give the examiner what the mark scheme calls for, which is why intelligent students can finish with a disappointing mark and no idea where it went.
This short lesson, about five and a half minutes long, is a quick, exam-focused briefing on how to approach the question. Mrs Wear takes five key points: what the task is really asking, how the marks and time should be balanced, the temptation to drift away from the skill being tested, how to make your judgement obvious to the person marking, and how much of the statement you actually need to deal with. It is a briefing, not a full masterclass, and it sits well alongside the longer worked lesson on this question.
You get the benefit of an examiner's view in plain, friendly language, plus a way of thinking about the question that makes the whole thing feel less like an essay lottery and more like a clear job to do.
Why this lesson is worth your time
- It explains what the question wants in a few minutes, without jargon.
- It tackles the timing mistake that costs students the most marks on Section A.
- It steers you away from writing the wrong kind of essay.
- It prepares you for the in-depth Question 4 lesson, so you get more from it.
Who should watch
Any student sitting AQA English Language Paper 1, especially those who run short of time near the end of Section A or whose long answers still score modestly. It helps students aiming for a pass and those aiming for the top grades alike. Teachers and parents will find it a handy plain-English summary of what this high-value question demands.
Make the most of it
Watch the video, then plan a Question 4 answer on a past paper, setting a timer so you practise the pacing too. Use the Fiction Technique Bank to find language and structure points to prove your case, and read the full-length answers in the Model Answers Paper 1 2017 AQA English Language GCSE. Test yourself with the quiz underneath afterwards.
This lesson is also on my YouTube channel. Watching it here means you can register to keep track of the lessons you have finished, bookmark lessons for later and test yourself with the quiz underneath.
So, this question will give you a statement that a student has said about the text that you've been answering questions on so far. The student will always say something that sounds like they really enjoyed the text, but also is kind of like simple. So, they might say something like they describe the setting in a really vivid way. The writer builds tension. It makes you feel like you're there. It makes you want to read on. Basically, any other sentence that every English teacher ever tells their students never to write in an exam AQA write in an exam. So, what you need to do with that statement is you need to evaluate, which means to judge, if that student's statement is correct. Spoiler alert, it is.
It always is. But, what you're trying to do is prove that they are correct beyond reasonable doubt. So, imagine you're like a lawyer in a case. Somebody said this is true, and you are really having to like prove that it's true. Cuz we can't just take this random student's word for it. You've got to really prove it. With that in mind, it's important to remember that you should never completely disagree with the statement, okay? AQA would have to be super messed up to give you a statement in the exam that is just plain wrong. They won't do that. So, make sure you either completely agree or kind of agree. In my course, which you can find on Stream English, on this exam paper I go into a lot more detail on how to have that kind of nuance of agreement, but my top tip to keep things simple here, just agree.
Just really agree and really prove that that student is right. So, this question is worth 20 marks, which is the same amount as questions 1, 2, and 3 combined. So, this is a really important question in this paper. And it's that is deliberate on the part of AQA because it's supposed to be a that combines the skills of questions 1, 2 and 3 as well. And I'll be doing videos on those questions, so keep an eye out for those and watch those if you need a bit of help and revision with those ones as well. Because it's worth 20 marks, you should spend 25 minutes answering the question. So, if you're spending an hour on section A, that means it's nearly half of your time. The worst, but one of the most common mistakes that students make, is they leave this question to the last minute.
They don't give themselves enough time to do it cuz they spent way too long on question 2 or question 3, and they don't give this one enough time. This is worth so many marks that it could really take multiple grades away from you if you do not answer this question. So, make sure you're really strong in your timings and you give question 4 the amount of time that it needs. Another reason that I tend to hate the student statement that's provided with this question is because it talks about the characters as if they are real people. Something like, "From reading this text, we can see that Alice really wishes her father would care for her more." What this then makes students do is not write an English essay, but a kind of like Jeremy Kyle-esque, Oprah Winfrey-esque, just like monologue about how we need to love one another and how parents need to care for their children.
Don't let the statement make you lose sight of what it is you're trying to do. You are there to prove that statement is correct by analysing language and structure. That's what you have to do. And again, I've got a lot of videos coming up on how to do that, so make sure you look out for those. But, as I mentioned earlier, evaluation just means that you're judging something. So, you want to be using language that shows that you're making a judgment. This is really useful just from a writing style perspective for the examiner because it's really almost like you're signposting, "Look, look, I'm evaluating. Give me marks. And then they can do that because they can clearly see that's what you're doing.
So, basically, what you want to do is use judgmental language. So, for example, the student is clearly correct because the writer successfully highlights. When we consider whether the student is correct, we can see that the student statement can sometimes be quite long. For example, it might say, in this text, the writer successfully builds up tension and makes us think that Maria and her father have a bad relationship. I don't know why I keep talking about fathers in bad relationships. I swear there's nothing going on in my life. Anyway, point is, when you've got two different things in there, you have to prove that Maria has a bad relationship with her father, and you have to prove there's a building of tension.
You might find it quite hard to try and prove both in 25 minutes. And you don't have to prove both. AQA have said that it's okay if you do not prove every single part of the statement. The key thing is, as I said back in point one, that the part that you do prove, you prove it beyond doubt. Nobody can argue that tension is built in this text because you have analysed that technique and that technique and that technique and that technique and that technique and that technique to all show that they come together and they build tension. Here, here, here, here, here, the tension increases, decreases, goes on a loop-de-loop, whatever it is that's going on in the text. You have left the examiner in no doubt that that student statement is right.
