Two Simple Ways to Improve Your General Paper AQ Evaluation (and boost your AQ scores!)
In my years of teaching General Paper (GP), I have met many J1 students who approach the Application Question (AQ) in Paper 2 with much trepidation, as they often wonder what is this new beast that they have to tackle (as though writing an argumentative essay about current affairs isn’t challenging enough!)
What makes it even more demoralising for students, is that they see their scores constantly hover at 3 or 4 at best for various reasons — be it due to a lack of time to complete the AQ or an incomplete understanding of the passage.
There are many aspects and skills to crafting a good AQ response, but for this post, I shall focus on a key skill: EVALUATION.
So what is EVALUATION? According to the Cambridge dictionary, the word is defined as “the process of judging or calculating the quality, importance, amount, or value of something”. The key word here is to “judge”.
Many students often write rather bleah AQ responses because they simply agree with the author and proceed to describe a local example to “prove” their point. Either that or they just disagree and give a contradictory example to “disprove” the author.
My friends, that’s not really evaluation.
Let’s look at an excerpt from the 2019 NJC Prelim passage (the topic is on Kindness):
Paragraph 3
“To be a hero today is simply to be a person who leans into the vulnerability that comes with seeing other people’s problems. Being a hero today requires no expert skills, no powers of flying or invisibility – in fact, one of the things that has helped devalue kindness over the past 30 or so years is the fact that we all know how to do it.”
A typical AQ response would probably agree with the author and explain that during this Covid-19 crisis, there are plenty of local heroes who are ordinary people. They would proceed to give examples of healthcare workers and volunteers selflessly and tirelessly working around the clock to ease the current situation.
Nothing wrong with this, but let’s examine the author’s claim a little further:
Paragraph 3
“To be a hero today is simply to be a person who leans into the vulnerability that comes with seeing other people’s problems. Being a hero today requires no expert skills, no powers of flying or invisibility – in fact, one of the things that has helped devalue kindness over the past 30 or so years is the fact that we all know how to do it.”
Looking at the words in bold, can we challenge the author’s assumption that 1) It is easy to see and empathise with other people’s problems? 2) Do we really all know how to be kind?
In fact, during this uncertain period where plenty of people are feeling fearful about the future, to suggest that kindness is an easy act is possibly to devalue it. It ignores the complexity, effort and sacrifice of looking out for others and practicing empathy in a situation where many find themselves facing their own problems. Likewise, do we all really know how to be kind? Or, in Singapore’s “kiasu” culture where the fear of losing out may be ingrained from a young age, is the tendency towards kindness less innate that the author suggests?
So if we give these questions some thought, we would realise that the initial response seems superficial. Evaluation therefore involves 1) considering unique aspects of the Singapore context and 2) challenging assumptions by examining loaded words like “simply” and “all”.
Of course there are other ways to practice evaluation — this is just a short sample to get you started. Hopefully as you practice this more often, you will get better at it!
For those who might need more help in the AQ, GP tuition can help as it provides opportunities to hone key AQ skills through guided practice. In AfterSkool’s GP programme, apart from learning how to spot logical fallacies (as this blog post has briefly demonstrated), students also learn how to provide substantiation for their evaluation and develop their AQ ideas in an organised and insightful manner.
If you’re interested in this programme, you can find out more at the link below. Or, if you want to find out other ways to improve your GP skills (and score!), you can also check out this article for my 3 tips on making GP revision fun!
Yvonne helms AfterSkool’s English and GP programme. A former MOE teacher, she has 7 years of experience teaching GP at two junior colleges. To enquire about AfterSkool’s GP programme, head over to our enquiry form.