MAY11 History HL - Paper 3

[Cynthia]

@iotabebraindead;

I know! I was looking at that question during reading time and wondering what the hell... it seems there's always some very random question, I expect it got like one or two responses worldwide if any lol

@000;

tbh you've mainly got either yourself or a really terrible teacher to blame for only going through a third of one topic and 2/3 of another when you should've done three whole ones in preparation for paper 3...

we have a brilliant teacher and i worked really hard. we in fact did 4 whole topics: french revolution and napoleon, alexander II and III, the Spanish Civil War, and Mussolini's rise/rule. those were our higher topics

and for paper 2 we did: rise and rule of hitler, mao and lenin and causes, practices and effects of WW1, WW2 (europe and pacific), Spanish Civil War and Chinese Civil War

We covered more than enough, way more than we needed to and i worked really hard. our class was just incredibly unlucky with the subjects that came up.

Yeah exactly my point. AII&AIII are parts of a topic which is Russia 1855-1924 also including NII, the revolutions, and Lenin; Spanish Civil War and Mussolini's RTP&rule are parts of the Interwar year option which also includes Weimar, Hitler's RTP, domestic and foreign policy, and the origins of WWII. You seem to have had a lot of overlap, but still doing all of these at the depth required for HL as well is the only guaranteed way of getting any exam questions at all as you saw this year. It is pretty unlucky and also sucked for a lot of other students so don't expect boundaries that are too high, but would probably be worth mentioning about this to your teacher. The Stolypin question to be fair isn't something anyone would've expected in a million years...

[Proletariat]

I actually found the test to be incredibly easy. I knew more than just the three I answered, so my three essays were, I felt, very well written and supported. Time budget (after a fail P2 where I spent 2/3 of the time on the first essay, because it had to include both World Wars) worked out perfectly.

1) Whether Napoleon's imperialist policies contributed to his ultimate failure. Took the stance that it did.

2) Impact of new German Empire on European Affairs (1871-1914). Took the stance that it had a detrimental effect, framing the position around its role in the leadup to WWI.

3) Success of Hitler's domestic policies (1933-39). Took the stance that both racial and economic policies were "successful."

I suppose to be fair my class covered more than just three options, since we are learning the IB curriculum and our provincial curriculum concurrently. However, if one's only doing three options then I would assume one would study them extensively. Since I had a broader base to draw on, I could afford to be more selective in topics (for example, I studied everything there is to know about Napoleon, but ignored French Rev, since of the two questions in T1 Napoleon and French Rev always get one each.) The German Empire question overlapped with the standard content in that it involved the causes of WWI (the removal of the balance of power, the arms buildup, are all also European Affairs that took place in the given scope), so I would have thought every student should have been able to write on that one at least. Our class also more or less ignored Hitler's domestic policies outside of Nuremberg and Kristallnacht, so I studied the rest (debt flotation, T4 Euthanasia, etc.) and it happened to work out great.

I actually chuckled when I read question 24. We didn't even touch T12, but I almost wanted to write it just for the hell of it, and draw on background knowledge completely (which is what I did in P2.)

I echo the sentiments of an earlier poster when they mentioned that their teacher failed to teach a complete Topic. Out of the six that our class dipped into, only one (Russia) was covered 100%. However, that just means that when you're studying, you have to take initiative, look at the syllabus, and figure out where to cut your losses (ie T1 example mentioned above) or patch up the holes (ie. studying Hitler's domestic policies on one's own.) Of course, sometimes one won't get everything (we only covered Cold War until 1991, since that's when the provincial curriculum stops, and the essay topics specifically asked for up to 2000), but ensuring one knows three out of 24 really doesn't seem that difficult.

[Proletariat]

The Stolypin question to be fair isn't something anyone would've expected in a million years...

My teacher actually gave us really extensive notes on Stolypin; I just happened to have decided to overlook the guy, which seems to me all the more stupid since I chose to review everything pre-Lenin.

[Cynthia]

The Stolypin question to be fair isn't something anyone would've expected in a million years...

My teacher actually gave us really extensive notes on Stolypin; I just happened to have decided to overlook the guy, which seems to me all the more stupid since I chose to review everything pre-Lenin.

Haha, we had about 2 pages on him in our (Russia-specific) textbook which was pretty limited to repression, land bank and wager on the strong. I chose that question because I thought very few candidates in the world would be able to answer it in essay length and I'd spent most of my study break reading historiography on Imperial Russia...

[Proletariat]

In my opinion paper 3 was poorly done by IBO from two reasons:

1) You could write 3 questions solely basing on Weimar Republic and Hitler.

2) The question about provisional government was a joke. Did you notice how it was formulated? I believe it was something like: "Two revolutions were the effect of failures of provisional government" To what extent do you agree with this statement. As far as I know provisional governent didn't exist before February revolution, so what was I suppose to write about ? I know that some people managed to deal with this question but come on!

I don't know what was IBO aiming for when planning this paper...

I agree, also the provisional government failed in 1917 therefore all you could do was base it on short term causes in terms of the PG. it was a horrible question!!

I don't remember the exact wording because I did not write on it, but I thought the intent of the question was for the student to formulate an opinion on whether or not the failure of the PG led to a second revolution (ie. Whether PG's failure resulted in two revolutions rather than just the one). That would involve discussing whether October was just a continuation of February, or a wholly independent one, or in whatever capacity between the two.

[Connhk]

Well we all found paper 3 for Asia/Oceania pretty easy. The expected topics came up on a couple questions but there were some other fairly random ones. All in all a fair paper which I thought I was able to attack quite well. I did a question on the ability of the Qing dynasty to suppress the Taiping Rebellion, the extent to which Yuan Shikai betrayed the 1912 revolutionaries and their republic and the extent to which the Long March of 1935 was a altered China's destiny. Messed up a couple names and forgot one in the last question but apart from that I thought it was fairly solid!

[BronxNerd]

I thought I was the only one that thought it was super hard! I would have wished that I would have studied other things, but I tried and that has to count for something. Hopefully a 4 in History, Lol.

[BronxNerd]

We should make a list of all the questions that there were on the test or the ones we can remember lol. I forgot what my first essay was about and now I can't remember.

[000]

@iotabebraindead;

I know! I was looking at that question during reading time and wondering what the hell... it seems there's always some very random question, I expect it got like one or two responses worldwide if any lol

@000;

tbh you've mainly got either yourself or a really terrible teacher to blame for only going through a third of one topic and 2/3 of another when you should've done three whole ones in preparation for paper 3...

we have a brilliant teacher and i worked really hard. we in fact did 4 whole topics: french revolution and napoleon, alexander II and III, the Spanish Civil War, and Mussolini's rise/rule. those were our higher topics

and for paper 2 we did: rise and rule of hitler, mao and lenin and causes, practices and effects of WW1, WW2 (europe and pacific), Spanish Civil War and Chinese Civil War

We covered more than enough, way more than we needed to and i worked really hard. our class was just incredibly unlucky with the subjects that came up.

Yeah exactly my point. AII&AIII are parts of a topic which is Russia 1855-1924 also including NII, the revolutions, and Lenin; Spanish Civil War and Mussolini's RTP&rule are parts of the Interwar year option which also includes Weimar, Hitler's RTP, domestic and foreign policy, and the origins of WWII. You seem to have had a lot of overlap, but still doing all of these at the depth required for HL as well is the only guaranteed way of getting any exam questions at all as you saw this year. It is pretty unlucky and also sucked for a lot of other students so don't expect boundaries that are too high, but would probably be worth mentioning about this to your teacher. The Stolypin question to be fair isn't something anyone would've expected in a million years...

What we covered in terms of Russia was pretty bad, we did Alex II and III in great detail and half studied the revolutions but we did barely anything on nicholas II and Lenin. We did do the interwar period in quite a lot of detail so the other topics you mentioned i knew quite well. I looked at a lot of past papers and the majority of the papers had a question on the Tsars, and the ones that didn't had either two questions on the french revolution and napoleon, or a question on mussolini, or a question on the spanish civil war. It was the first paper where this wasnt the case! There were three questions that i was able to answer, but that doesn't mean it wasn't an extremely unfair paper.

Edited May 15, 2011 by 000

[Konni93]

In my opinion paper 3 was poorly done by IBO from two reasons:

1) You could write 3 questions solely basing on Weimar Republic and Hitler.

2) The question about provisional government was a joke. Did you notice how it was formulated? I believe it was something like: "Two revolutions were the effect of failures of provisional government" To what extent do you agree with this statement. As far as I know provisional governent didn't exist before February revolution, so what was I suppose to write about ? I know that some people managed to deal with this question but come on!

I don't know what was IBO aiming for when planning this paper...

I agree, also the provisional government failed in 1917 therefore all you could do was base it on short term causes in terms of the PG. it was a horrible question!!

I don't remember the exact wording because I did not write on it, but I thought the intent of the question was for the student to formulate an opinion on whether or not the failure of the PG led to a second revolution (ie. Whether PG's failure resulted in two revolutions rather than just the one). That would involve discussing whether October was just a continuation of February, or a wholly independent one, or in whatever capacity between the two.

Is there any debate on that... I mean, I thought that rather obvious...

[Cynthia]

Is there any debate on that... I mean, I thought that rather obvious...

Some people tried to argue that July was a revolution, I found it pretty obvious as well but to be fair it did require to reread, I was a bit worried I'd accidentally missed some huge debate on a 3rd revolution in Russia...

[Konni93]

Is there any debate on that... I mean, I thought that rather obvious...

Some people tried to argue that July was a revolution, I found it pretty obvious as well but to be fair it did require to reread, I was a bit worried I'd accidentally missed some huge debate on a 3rd revolution in Russia...

Fat chance YOU would...

Do you think its viable to devote a major section of the paragraph to external circumstances though, as a cause for the revolution? I just took them as distinct... How did you guys structure the essay? And how do you people treat conclusions in general; do you actually give a conclusion (i.e. without Lenin's personal contribution, it would have been impossible) or do you simply spam out a bunch of historiography and then do the demure ToK essay thing along the lines of "it may be so and it may be so" (which i guess has a certain sense to it, as if figes and conquest and people havent found a consensus, its probably not gonna be found by a 12th-grader in a 45 min. essay!)

[Polo]

Do you think that if I wrote only one answer sheet for the Influence of depression on Germany I would get like 9-10 points ?

[lexie]

Do you think that if I wrote only one answer sheet for the Influence of depression on Germany I would get like 9-10 points ?

Depends what you wrote (quality over quantity, although that is not very much quantity) and if you wrote an outline beforehand. You get points for things in your outline that you ran out of time to mention in your essay. If you wrote a persuasive argument for the influence of the depression on Germany without major errors I suppose you should get 9-10 points even if it wasn't particularly deep/considered other points of view. Have a look at the markbands, that's probably most helpful

[Proletariat]

@iotabebraindead;

I know! I was looking at that question during reading time and wondering what the hell... it seems there's always some very random question, I expect it got like one or two responses worldwide if any lol

@000;

tbh you've mainly got either yourself or a really terrible teacher to blame for only going through a third of one topic and 2/3 of another when you should've done three whole ones in preparation for paper 3...

we have a brilliant teacher and i worked really hard. we in fact did 4 whole topics: french revolution and napoleon, alexander II and III, the Spanish Civil War, and Mussolini's rise/rule. those were our higher topics

and for paper 2 we did: rise and rule of hitler, mao and lenin and causes, practices and effects of WW1, WW2 (europe and pacific), Spanish Civil War and Chinese Civil War

We covered more than enough, way more than we needed to and i worked really hard. our class was just incredibly unlucky with the subjects that came up.

Yeah exactly my point. AII&AIII are parts of a topic which is Russia 1855-1924 also including NII, the revolutions, and Lenin; Spanish Civil War and Mussolini's RTP&rule are parts of the Interwar year option which also includes Weimar, Hitler's RTP, domestic and foreign policy, and the origins of WWII. You seem to have had a lot of overlap, but still doing all of these at the depth required for HL as well is the only guaranteed way of getting any exam questions at all as you saw this year. It is pretty unlucky and also sucked for a lot of other students so don't expect boundaries that are too high, but would probably be worth mentioning about this to your teacher. The Stolypin question to be fair isn't something anyone would've expected in a million years...

What we covered in terms of Russia was pretty bad, we did Alex II and III in great detail and half studied the revolutions but we did barely anything on nicholas II and Lenin. We did do the interwar period in quite a lot of detail so the other topics you mentioned i knew quite well. I looked at a lot of past papers and the majority of the papers had a question on the Tsars, and the ones that didn't had either two questions on the french revolution and napoleon, or a question on mussolini, or a question on the spanish civil war. It was the first paper where this wasnt the case! There were three questions that i was able to answer, but that doesn't mean it wasn't an extremely unfair paper.

There were two questions on French Rev and Napoleon. There is always two questions on French Rev and Napoleon - one each - because the two are one topic.

[ZBP92]

I take HOTA and was surprised by Paper 3, it seemed very different from the past few years' papers. Nothing on Malcolm X vs MLK, nothing on the supreme court rulings on civil rights cases, and nothing on Reagan or detente... really nothing on the Cold War at all after Eisenhower.

Still, I thought I did quite well. I wrote about the influence of France and Holland in the American Revolution, wrote about the Monroe Doctrine, and then wrote about Peron's domestic policies... that question was nice since we covered Peron and Vargas extensively in class and I'd already wrote about Peron in Paper 2.

[MajorMajor]

Ha, ha. I'm the luckiest guy ever, I did my Historical Investigation on the Great Depression in Poland, and suddenly there popped up a question about the effects of the Depression on one European country. So I was able to give statistics, names of historians, precise information etc. so that I expect a near 20/20 result. There was not a single topic I could be more prepared to write

I also was quite pleased to find the topic about the effects of WWI on one state. I remembered some interesting details about the internal situation in Russia during WWI such as the prohibition of alcohol sales, the unpopularity of Alexandra, the German wife of the Tsar, or the problems with food distribution caused by the army seizing a lot of the rolling stock and taking over the administration of the western railways in Russia.

The Provisional Government question was not easy, and I probably screwed it up by writing a not-very-detailed response about the decision to continue war, the failure to draw a constitution, the chaos caused by political liberties, and the weakness of Kerensky lying in his failure to cope with the Petrograd Soviet and Lenin's Bolsheviks.

Anyway, I agree that the questions were difficult, it's just my luck that (I think) secured me a 7.

Edited May 15, 2011 by MajorMajor

[itsjustib]

I was surprised not to see Mussolini on the paper, which kinda annoyed me since I studied him in detail, but was really happy anyways. I had an hour to go after I finihsed my second essay ^^ It went much better than paper 2

I did:

- Russian Revolution/weakness of Prov. Gov.

- Impat of WWI on domestic affairs of a country (chose Russia, which was neat since I could put stuff from my first essay into this one)

- Allied foreign policy in the Middle East

Edited May 15, 2011 by itsjustib

[Andrewwz]

Paper 3 was pretty easy for me. Guess I was lucky because I studied the great depression on USA and Mexico so I could answer:

-the Franklin Roosvelt question

-a Latin-American country's response to the great depression (of course I wrote about mexico)

also i answered one question about the mexican revolution, which was one of the topics we revised at class and I should know because I'm mexican, even though it was my weakest essay, because I did it in less than 30 minutes, and I didn't studied the revolution at all.

I guess I did pretty well, after my poor performance on paper 2

[Lumiere914]

Alright so I have one question regarding a question on the History of the Americas Paper 3. I choose as one of my essays to do the one on the Monroe Doctrine. The question was, For what reasons and with what results was the Monroe Doctrine established in 1823? How exactly would you go about answering this one? Would have to talk about specific events leading up to the Monroe Doctrine? I talked about neocolonialism and the need for it and then talked about the specifics of the Doctrine and the results of the Doctrine.

Edited May 16, 2011 by Lumiere914