This year’s Standard grade General paper produced “nothing remotely contentious”, in the view of Stewart MacDonald, principal teacher of geography at Eastbank Academy in Glasgow.
The Credit paper, on the other hand, was “probably the most difficult for a few years” - a view shared by a number of his colleagues, he said. Looked at individually, the questions were “not that bad”, but collectively, they added up to a difficult paper.
He picks out questions 7 and 9, commenting that it is unusual to have two questions dealing with the impact of tourism, albeit that one dealt with the UK and the other Gambia.
Question 10, particularly the last part, dealing with measures of development, was virtually the same as a question in last year’s Higher paper and was looking for almost as much information.
The question on population distribution - number 8 - asked candidates to assimilate a lot of information, he thought.
Mr MacDonald did, however, like the first question in the paper - a mapping one - which he thought would benefit candidates who were good at studying maps and using the evidence provided.
“Those at the lower end of Credit, on the borderline between General and Credit, will suffer this year. In other years, they might have picked up marks in a few easy questions,” he says.
