Significance of exam boards for practice - sp. English

[Stokers]

Hello, all. Can anyone more experienced than me advise whether it is worth doing practice exam questions for English from another exam board. Eg. DS sitting Edexcel - is it useful or counter productive to do the Romeo and Juliet and Jekyll and Hyde questions from AQA or are the syllabuses and mark schemes completely different?
Thanks, Stokers.

[Daogroupie]

Absolutely.

The more students can attempt questions on their set books and then compare their answers to the mark schemes and examiners reports the better.

There is also the past papers of WJEC, OCR and IGCSE Edexcel and CIE which also use these two texts.

I would also recommend watching as many different versions of the text as you can. You can pick up second hand versions of the various productions very cheaply on ebay and amazon. DG

[piggys]

It is definitely worthwhile; the format of the Shakespeare question is almost identical- a small section of text to analyse in depth and to then link more widely to the text as a whole. I can't remember without checking what the main differences in mark schemes are but the AOs are the same. I use generic questions to cover OCR, AQA and EDEXCEL because the texts are the same and the questions are similar too.

The same goes for the modern text question (your ds is likely doing An Inspector Calls, Lord of the Flies or DNA) and the 2 parts of the Poetry paper as well as the pre 20th C text. I would avoid OCR for poetry revision and the modern text because their format is quite different, but AQA and EDEXCEL are very similar.

I would disagree with Daogroupie regarding CIE and IGCSE though - their questions are not similar, and in any case they still allow the Shakespeare to run as a coursework component (remember those? ) so not much use to you.

[Stokers]

Thank you both; it sounds very much like we should press ahead. And, yes, DG, I think now is the time to watch some different productions - he's read them so many times now!

[Daogroupie]

The Olivia Hussey R and J is particularly good, should be easy to find on ebay.

[Stokers]

Thanks DG. Located last night, popcorn at the ready!