GCSE Religious Studies
There are four main exam boards in the UK offering qualifications at GCSE level in Religious Studies. These are AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas.
Whether you’re a student yourself or a parent looking to provide support hopefully you’ll find something that will help. From how to get started to pointers for making the most of revision resources we’ll cover it all.
Find out what course you're doing
As noted above there are four different exam boards that offer a GCSE in Religious Studies, and each one will offer a multitude of different option blocks to study. Your school website will typically provide details of which exam board they use and which options they choose, but if you’re struggling to find it reach out to your teacher for confirmation.
It’s really important to be clear on which route you’re following as each exam board will differ not just in terms of content, but also in terms of the structure of the exams themselves.
Do your homework before your start
A really good place to start is to familiarise yourself with the specification for the course. Listed below are links to the specifications for each of the exam boards:
AQA – Religious Studies A (8062) / AQA Religious Studies B (8063)
Pearson Edexcel – Religious Studies A (2016) / Pearson Edexcel – Religious Studies B (2016)
OCR – Religious Studies – J625
WJEC / Eduqas – Religious Studies
When going through these there are a number of things you’re looking for including:
- The number of exam papers you’ll need to sit and how long each one is.
- What parts of the specification are covered by which exam.
- How many questions you’ll need to answer and how many marks are they worth.
- The weighting of each paper (are they equally weighted across or does one paper contribute more to your grade than another).
Work to your strengths
When it comes to revision it’s important to identify how you learn best. Some people learn best by making copious notes, some prefer to work visually and will watch videos or make mindmaps. Others prefer to focus solely on question practice. Once you know what works best for you’ll be better placed to work more effectively.
We’ve included some links to some of the most helpful resources we found. Some of these are books you’ll need to purchase from third-parties, others are materials we’ve developed ourselves which we hope you enjoy.
Practice, practice, practice
Your teacher should also spend a lot of time with you explaining how to approach each question so you can maximise the marks you earn. This is something that takes quite a bit of work – so don’t be disheartened if you don’t get it at first. Speak to you teacher and ask them for pointers as to where you can improve. Making mistakes and getting things wrong are all part of learning, in fact you’ll probably learn more from a mistake as it’ll show you where to improve, so embrace it and don’t let it get you down.
Its also a good idea to take a look at some of the mark-schemes and model answers from past papers as these will give you a very good idea of what the examiners are looking for in terms of quantity.
We’ve included links below for past papers for each of the exam boards. Exam boards will not release papers for at least the last two exams taken as these are generally used by teachers as mock-exams. Spend a LOT of time practicing these questions as it won’t just help you remember the content, but will also give you plenty of practice with structuring your answers effectively.
When you’re starting to feel more confident with content then do some past exam papers in exam conditions too – sticking stringently to the time limits as this will encourage good time-management during the exam itself.
Useful Resources
In this section we’ve listed some resources we found across the internet that we found useful. Some of these are free and some of these are not, where there is a cost we have tried to indicate this and prices are correct at the time of publishing, but may change slightly.
We have also included some resources of our own which we hope you find useful.
AQA Religion Peace and Conflict These D – Revision Resource – Christianity and Buddhism
AQA Religion Crime and Punishment – Theme E – Revision Resource – Christianity and Buddhism