History HL Paper 3: History of Europe [May 2010]

[itjamesd]

I thought the paper was fair and the first question on the French Revolution was fantastic.

What did everyone else think ?

[caleyfollmer]

I thought it was pretty good too! I looked at Italian Unification, the peace treaty question (which was awesome) and the collective security question which was great since it was the same as the DBQ on Abyssinia - so it gave me more sources/names to drop!

[soadquake981]

It was a great set of questions. I did the French Revolution (1), Napoleon (2), and German unification (4).

[HanoBee]

i thought paper 3 was good. I'm TZ2, I took the question about the post-war peace treaty (I wrote about the Locarno treaties), and the failure of collective security, and the last question I took was a bit risky, I think they might now give me any marks for it. It's the question that was like "To what extent, and with what results, was there an industrial revolution in the fifty years that you have studied about one country" or something like that. The thing is I didn't prepare very well for P3, and this was the only question that I thought I might be able to answer. We never took the industrial revolution but we took the USSR under Stalin. So I wrote about how Stalin industrialized the USSR and made the Five Years Plan, and by the end of the 1930's Russia was the most powerful industrial state in the world. I don't know if they're going to consider what happened during Stalin's rule as an "industrial revolution" but it was industrialization, right?

[soadquake981]

I thought the US was the world's most powerful industrialized nation, even in the 1930s? I could be wrong.

[HanoBee]

I thought the US was the world's most powerful industrialized nation, even in the 1930s? I could be wrong.

Before the Great Depression it was the most powerful industrialized nation but it regressed for while and until it joined WWII the US was still suffering greatly when it came to industry and the economy in general. That's when the USSR took the chance to "isolate" itself from the rest of the world and make itself self-sustaining so that it wouldn't need help from any other nation.

[CommeDesEnfants]

The paper was pretty good; I was paranoid that I wouldn't have anything to write on, haha. I did the question on Alexander II's reforms, the nature/causes of the 1917 Russian Revolutions and Mussolini vs Hitlers' domestic policies.

For the compare/contrast one, how much do they really expect you to analyze? For the last one, I was kind of running out of time (2.5 hours pass by so quickly!), and I began to feel like I was just listing their economic/social/political/religious policies in the same paragraph. I tried to incite a discussion on reasons, results and effectiveness in comparison to one another, but I don't know.

I'm just glad the bane of my existence History HL's done!

[zakuropanda]

I think the paper was good. I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the school to write about the Russian Revolutions (we covered it last year). Then I did Hitler/Mussolini followed by the WWI treaty - writing, as I'm sure you've guessed, about Versailles.. (TZ1).

[CommeDesEnfants]

I think the paper was good. I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the school to write about the Russian Revolutions (we covered it last year). Then I did Hitler/Mussolini followed by the WWI treaty - writing, as I'm sure you've guessed, about Versailles.. (TZ1).

Oh, how much "analysis" did you really write for the first two? I kind of found it hard to be super analytical in a way that I was used to with compare/contrast..

[D. C.]

I wasn't completely thrilled by the questions, but I don't think I could've hoped for a better set.

I did the questions on German unification, Alexander II, and the 1917 Russian revolutions - SO glad there weren't any comparison questions! I hadn't revised Italian unification OR Alexander III (it was rumoured that comparison questions could've come up this year), so all I can say is thank God I got away with it.

My first two essays were pretty good, but I think my 1917 Russian revolutions one was pretty crappy unfortunately...but isn't it always the fact that a candidate will be able to do two essays REALLY well, and then a third one averagely well? Or is it just me...