IGCSE History 0470: Two Papers, Two Completely Different Skills

Most students revise IGCSE History as one subject. They learn the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic, the Cold War, and they walk into both papers with the same preparation.

Then the marks come back uneven, and nobody can explain why a student who clearly knows the content scored well on one paper and badly on the other.

Here is the explanation, straight from Cambridge's own assessment tables: Paper 1 awards 0% for source evaluation. Paper 2 awards 0% for explanation. They are not two exams on the same subject. They are two exams on two different skills, and the content is only the raw material.

The three assessment objectives, and why they matter more than the content

Cambridge marks History against three assessment objectives. Simplifying only slightly: AO1 is recalling and selecting historical knowledge. AO2 is explaining and analysing it — causation, significance, consequence, the "why" and "how far". AO3 is handling source material — comprehending, interpreting and evaluating evidence.

Now look at how those are distributed. This is the single most useful table in the syllabus and almost nobody reads it.

Read that once more, because it reorganises everything. In Paper 2, two-thirds of the marks that reward explaining causes and consequences simply do not exist. You are being marked on what you can do with a set of documents you have never seen. In Paper 1, the reverse: nobody will ask you to evaluate a source, and every mark above basic recall is for argument.

Paper 1: the (a), (b), (c) ladder

Two hours, 60 marks, 40% of the grade. You answer two questions from Section A (Core content) and one question from Section B (Depth studies). Every question is a structured essay split into three parts, and those parts climb a deliberate ladder.

1. Part (a) — describe
   Pure AO1. Short, factual, and the one place where recall is the whole job. Answer it quickly and precisely; do not write an essay. Students routinely spend far too long here and run out of time on the part worth most.
2. Part (b) — explain
   AO2 begins. This is "why did X happen" or "why was Y important". Each explained reason earns credit; a list of facts without the causal link does not.
3. Part (c) — argue and judge
   The heaviest part, and pure AO2. "How far do you agree?" requires argument on both sides and an actual judgement at the end. A balanced answer with no conclusion loses the marks the conclusion carries.

The timing consequence is concrete: three questions in 120 minutes means about 40 minutes each, and within each question the (c) part deserves roughly half of that. Most lost marks in Paper 1 are lost to a well-known pattern — a beautiful part (a), a solid part (b), and a rushed part (c) that never reaches a judgement.

Paper 2: the paper you cannot revise for, and how to prepare anyway

One hour 45, 40 marks, 30% of the grade, and 80% of it is AO3. You answer one question on one prescribed topic drawn from the Core content, working from a range of source materials supplied in the paper.

The detail that changes how you prepare: the prescribed topics change in each exam series. There is no reliable way to predict which topic will appear, and no revision strategy built on guessing it will survive contact with the paper.

What you can prepare is the skill, and the skill is narrower than it sounds. Source questions repeat a small set of demands:

Component 3 or Paper 4 — the 30% your school chooses

The third component is Coursework (Component 3) or Paper 4, Alternative to Coursework, at 40 marks and 30% either way. Coursework is one piece of extended writing on a depth study — either from the syllabus or devised by the centre — internally assessed and externally moderated. Paper 4 is the examined alternative.

The weighting profile is the same for both: AO1 38%, AO2 62%, AO3 0%. In other words it behaves like Paper 1, not Paper 2 — argument and explanation, with no source-evaluation credit. If your school runs coursework, that 30% is largely in your hands and under no time pressure, which makes it the cheapest 30% in the whole qualification to secure.

What's actually on the syllabus

The Core content runs as two options — broadly a nineteenth-century route and a twentieth-century route — and schools then choose depth studies on top. The combinations we see most often across our question bank are:

• The 19th Century: the development of modern nation states, 1848–1914
  Core content option. Unification, empire and the road to 1914.
• The 20th Century: international relations from 1919
  The far more commonly taught option — Versailles, the League, the origins of the Second World War, the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• Germany, 1918–45
  The most widely taken depth study anywhere in the world, and the one with the deepest question coverage in our bank.
• Russia, 1905–41
  Revolution, civil war, Stalin's transformation of the economy and the terror.
• The United States, 1919–41
  Boom, bust and the New Deal — and a rich seam of source material, which makes it good Paper 2 training ground.

History is also one of the subjects most often described as "easy" by people who have not sat it, which is why it appears in our honest ranking of which IGCSEs are actually hardest — and why it is worth thinking about carefully when choosing subjects. If you are new to the qualification entirely, start with what IGCSE is.

Your school picks the route; the exam only asks about what you were taught. If you are unsure which Core option and which depth studies your centre entered you for, ask — it is the first thing to establish before building a revision plan, and it is surprisingly common for students not to know.

Why we can help with this one specifically

History is the third-largest question bank on PapaMarks and one of the least discovered: 20,857 tagged questions across 111 topics, with 379 revision-note sets and materials. That volume matters more in History than in most subjects, for a specific reason.

Source technique is a pattern-recognition skill. You get good at "why was this source published?" by meeting that question fifty times across fifty different sources — not by reading advice about how to answer it. The same goes for the part (c) judgement: the structure becomes automatic somewhere around the thirtieth attempt, and not before. That is exactly the kind of volume that is impossible to get from a textbook and uneconomic to buy by the hour.

Open the History 0470 library to see the full topic tree, or start with the two most-taught areas — international relations from 1919 and Germany 1918–45. If you want the general method rather than the subject specifics, command words and how mark schemes award credit are the two posts that transfer best to History — followed by how to revise properly and how grade boundaries actually work, which matters in a subject where the difference between grades is a few marks of technique.

FAQ

If one thing changes after reading this, make it the revision plan: split it into "argument practice" and "source practice" instead of "topics", and time the split roughly the way Cambridge weights it. Open the History 0470 library and create a PapaMarks account — 20,857 questions is enough to make the technique automatic, which is the only thing that moves a History grade.