History Extension 2025 HSC exam pack

Students should:

• read the question carefully to ensure that they do not miss important components of the question
• have a clear understanding of key words in the question and recognise the intent of the question and its requirements
• relate to the question throughout the response, rather than just at the beginning
• sustain their judgements throughout the response with a clear connection to the question
• communicate ideas and information using historical terms and concepts accurately
• present a comprehensive, logical, and sustained response.

In better responses, students were able to:

• identify Bongiorno's interpretation of the aims and purposes of history in Source A
• provide an evaluation of Bongiorno’s interpretation that raised relevant historiographical issues, for example, the context in which Bongiorno was speaking, the relationship between history and politics, history’s civic and public role
• show an understanding of the historiographical issues raised by the source and question
• make meaningful connections between historiographical issues, the source and the student’s own examples
• support perceptive judgement(s), using at least two other sources, to convey deep knowledge relevant to the question of Bongiorno's interpretation of the aims and purposes of history, rather than the aims and purposes of history more generally
• consistently integrate material from Source A to support the evaluation being made
• provide convincing argumentation and analysis, and avoid descriptive narrative or a chronological survey.

Areas for students to improve include:

• ensuring that they have detailed knowledge of a range of sources, allowing them to select those sources most relevant to the question
• selecting the most relevant sources, rather than using every source they have studied
• starting paragraphs with clear topic sentences that address the question, rather than beginning paragraphs with examples
• offering more than chronological surveys of producers of history over time and how they approached the issues raised in the question
• integrating the source based on a genuine understanding of the issues raised, rather than cherrypicking isolated phrases from the source to make forced connections to their own examples
• if sources from non-historians are used, linking the sources explicitly to judgements about the question in a relevant way
• using examples to support insights into aspects of the question, rather than simply describing the examples.

In better responses, students were able to:

• directly answer the question with an explicit line of argument that consistently explores the ideas in the source and specific methods of historians
• provide a strong judgement about Source B applied to the methods of historians, whether agreeing or disagreeing with it
• analyse methods with specific detail in relation to the historians in their case study
• identify what constitutes methods and how historians work, for example, the selection of evidence, asking different questions of the past, tools for critical reading of the available evidence such as feminist, interdisciplinary, comparative, psychohistorical, or demographic approaches
• interact with multiple concepts from the source, for example, ‘draw conclusions’, 'truth’, ‘increasingly nearer’ and 'analyses’
• choose the most relevant historians and areas of debate to support their response
• demonstrate an in-depth and nuanced understanding of their case study.

Areas for students to improve include:

• making stronger connections between the concepts in Source B and the question
• knowing the relevant historiographical issue, for example, historians’ methodologies, and the areas of debate
• ensuring that the question drives the response, rather than it being driven by examples or debates
• providing arguments supported by examples from the case study, rather than narrative or description of these examples
• selecting the most applicable examples rather than using all historians for a particular case study
• focusing on the methods of historians, rather than on less relevant material such as context or purpose
• identifying the specific areas of debate clearly.