GCSE Sociology past papers, marked against the real criteria

Sociology papers in the AQA format — families, education, crime and deviance, stratification — with the mark scheme sitting beside every question. You write the answer in full; it is marked the way an examiner marks it, mark by mark, including the marks for naming a perspective that a sensible, common-sense answer never earns.

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What "marked against the criteria" actually means

Sociology is the subject where a pupil can write four true sentences about the world and come out with one mark. The scheme is not asking what you think about families, schools or crime; it is asking which sociologists think what, and why.

The words to watch are "unfair", "wrong" and "should": each usually marks a sentence where a perspective was wanted and a personal view turned up.

Naming the perspective, and using the terms

Four perspectives carry most of the specification, and an answer is expected to say which one it speaks for. Functionalists such as Talcott Parsons see the family as meeting society's needs, through primary socialisation and through absorbing the stresses adults bring home from work. Marxists follow Friedrich Engels, who argued the monogamous nuclear family grew up alongside private property so that wealth could pass to legitimate heirs, and so serves capitalism rather than everyone. Feminists, Ann Oakley among them, argue it serves men. The New Right, associated with Charles Murray, argue the conventional nuclear family socialises children in a way nothing else matches. Four answers to one question, and the examiner needs to know which is yours.

If the name has gone, describe the perspective and keep writing: "Marxist sociologists argue…" earns where "some people say…" does not. The specialist terms are short enough to get exactly right — cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu's term for the knowledge and language schools already reward; labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy, from Howard Becker on the teacher's picture of the ideal pupil; the hidden curriculum; patriarchy; relative poverty; the dark figure of crime; the moral panic Stanley Cohen described after the press reaction to the Mods and Rockers. Schemes reward a named theorist with development, which cuts both ways: a name dropped in and left there scores nothing.

The Item is not decoration

Several questions hang off an Item, a short source of three or four lines. When the question says "Using Item A", the marks are arranged so that an answer which never touches the Item cannot reach the top level. Pupils miss them because the theory they revised is general and the Item is specific.

The fix is mechanical — take a phrase out of the Item, put a concept beside it, say how the two connect. If the Item describes a class the teachers were told had scored highest, which a term later had made the most progress although its pupils were picked at random, the answer is not "labelling affects achievement". It is that the teachers' expectations came true, which is the self-fulfilling prophecy, and the Item is that happening in front of you. Rosenthal and Jacobson found exactly that in a real school.

The twelve-mark question has to decide something

Each topic ends with an extended question worth twelve marks, usually "Discuss how far sociologists would agree that…". It is level-marked on the whole answer rather than by ticking points, and the top level wants more than one view, developed, reaching a justified conclusion. There is no Foundation tier in Sociology; every pupil meets these, and they decide the grade.

Two failures cost the top band, both at the end. The first is the answer that argues one side only, usually the side the pupil agrees with. The second is commoner: both sides are set out properly and the last line says it depends on your point of view — true of every question in the subject, and it decides nothing. A conclusion that scores says which explanation is stronger and why: that the attitudes Oscar Lewis described among the poor look more like a response to poverty than a cause of it, so the structural explanation carries more weight. You may come down on either side. You may not decline.

Methods questions want the same commitment: a strength listed in the abstract earns nothing, and earns once it is tied to the research in front of you — weighed against the practical (time, cost, access), the ethical (consent, harm, whether those studied are children) and the theoretical (whether results can be repeated, or reach what people mean). A study of bullying inside a school meets all three at once, and the answer that names which of them decided it scores.

Every one of these is the same gap: between knowing the sociology and writing it in the form the scheme pays for. The gap only shows on your own answer.

The papers

42 questions across 6 papers, each with its own criteria. Everything here is written in the boards' own format and judged against their published criteria; the papers themselves belong to the boards and are not reproduced here.

Try it on your own answer

Open a paper, write what you would have written in the exam, including the wrong bits, and read what comes back. It is free to start and does not ask for a card.

Open GCSE Sociology

The other subjects

Twenty-three in one place, aligned to AQA, Edexcel and OCR.