“The Importance of the Syllabus Specification”

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How do your teachers know what to teach you for your GCSE course?

The answer is a document called the “Syllabus specification” or the Spec for short.

This document is written for the teachers and you can comfortably ignore much of the introductory material about why you should use a particular exam board, you’re looking for the bit called Subject Content. I want to suggest to you that the Spec is one of the most important documents that will help you prepare for the final assessments. I’ll illustrate this by drawing on a personal anecdote from my first year as a Principal Examiner for OCR (these are the people that set the exam papers).

As a new Principal Examiner keen to make an impact I decided to write, what I thought was a challenging and interesting question set in an unusual context, so that’s what I did. I was somewhat disappointed when I received the question back: “It’s an interesting question but it is not on the syllabus specification” 

Henceforth, whenever I wrote exam questions, I made sure that I had the Spec right in front of me. When writing a question I would make absolutely sure that I was addressing the Spec. If details of a particular Chemical process were clearly outlined in the spec, well then that was fair game for a question. Now textbooks may vary but if, for example, you are required to illustrate covalent bonding in a simple molecule such as ammonia then you cannot go wrong using the notation that is outlined in the spec:

Now I should say here that the examiners are allowed some latitude when writing questions and when the command word “suggest” is used (see previous blog) it’s time use your wider knowledge of the subject, but these questions make up a small percentage of the overall paper.

So, in summary, whenever your are revising (and there are so many resources available these days) do not forget to have the spec front and centre of things. I would suggest printing the subject content section out and marking the statements off as you go. I have had many a student tell me that it made a real difference!

As ever, good luck!