At a glance
Individual · three hours, in the examination period · written, with a calculator · all five strands, weighted roughly as the course spent its time on them
What it is for
Almost everything else this semester was done with a partner, a bench, and the internet open. This is the one piece of evidence that is unambiguously yours, and it is the first examination most of you will write in high school. That is worth saying plainly: the format is new, so this page tells you exactly what it contains.
What is on it
| Part | Roughly | What it asks you to do |
|---|---|---|
| A. Ecosystems and climate | 20% | Read a food web; trace a cycle; explain a human impact; read a climate graph honestly |
| B. Chemistry | 20% | Physical versus chemical change with evidence; a Bohr-Rutherford diagram; the periodic table used to predict; a name from a formula |
| C. Electricity | 20% | Read a circuit diagram; apply Ohm’s law; compare series and parallel; calculate an efficiency |
| D. Space | 15% | Scale and distance; the Sun’s role; the cause of an astronomical phenomenon |
| E. Skills, across everything | 25% | Measure, graph, identify variables, judge a source, and say what your evidence does and does not allow you to claim |
Part E is not a separate section on the paper. It is woven through the others: a data set you have never seen, a graph to draw, a claim to judge. That is a quarter of the mark, and it is the part that is impossible to cram, because it was built over five months.
What to expect, precisely
- Explain, do not only name. “It is a chemical change” earns little; naming the evidence — a new substance, a colour change that will not reverse, gas produced — earns full marks.
- Calculations want the working. The formula, the substitution, the answer, and the unit. An answer alone earns almost nothing, and a number with no unit is not an answer.
- Diagrams are marked: a circuit drawn with the standard symbols, a Bohr-Rutherford diagram with the right number of electrons in the right shells, a graph with labelled and scaled axes.
- The data question is not a memory question. It rewards reading carefully. The marks are in the reasoning, not the arithmetic.
- Terminology is expected to be exact: current and voltage, element and compound, biotic and abiotic, mass and weight.
How to prepare
- Redo questions, do not reread them. Five from each set, cold: Graphing Practice, Scientific Notation and Units, Reading a Food Web, Interpreting Climate Graphs, Bohr-Rutherford Diagrams, Naming Compounds, Circuit Diagram Practice, Ohm’s Law Practice, Efficiency Calculations, Scale and Distance Calculations.
- Redraw the diagrams from memory — an atom, a series circuit, a food web, the carbon cycle. If you cannot draw it, you cannot yet explain it.
- Re-read your own Lab Reports. What you wrote about what went wrong at the bench is the most efficient revision there is, because you wrote it at the moment you understood.
- Say the explanations out loud. Every long-answer mark on this paper is a sentence you could have said to somebody.
- Bring your questions to the review classes. There are four of them, and this page is what is on the examination.
In the three hours
Budget by the weightings above and wear a watch. Do the calculations while you are fresh. If an explanation stalls, write what you DO know about the science — partial explanations earn partial marks, and a blank space earns none.
How this is assessed
Against the same expectations as everything else. Per How Marks Work, this examination is part of the final 30% of the course mark alongside Culminating Reflection and Final Portfolio, so that neither one afternoon nor one piece of writing decides your grade alone.
Curriculum connection
B2.2
explain how naturally occurring phenomena, including the cycling of matter and the flow of energy, contribute to the dynamic equilibrium within and between ecosystems
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B2.6
identify and use various indicators of climate change to describe the impacts of climate change on local and global ecosystems, and analyse how human activities contribute to climate change
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C2.4
explain the relationship between the position of an element in the periodic table and the structure of its atoms, using models
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D2.5
apply a mathematical model to calculate electric current, potential difference, and resistance in real- world situations
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E2.5
quantify distances in the solar system and the universe by applying an understanding of relative distances and sizes and using appropriate units of measure
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