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GCSE Religious Studies A

 

 

Updated GCSE Religious Beliefs and Lifestyles specification

We wanted to give you and your students much more flexibility and choice. So we consulted RS teachers and designed a full and a short course with:

  • a modular structure and more assessment options
  • greater choice of topics and combinations within units
  • accessibility to students of any or no religious persuasion
  • no stressful coursework and no controlled assessment.

With our new spec, you can choose to:

  • construct a course to suit your specialism and students' religious backgrounds and interests
  • follow a focussed, systematic study of Christian denominations or two or three major religions
  • use existing resources from our outgoing spec wherever possible.

All about our Religious Studies A spec

Course structures and assessments

You can spread assessments, in any order, for this specification over two years or allow students to sit all units at the end of one or two years, with a re-sit option.

Full course

  • Any two of 14 units available
  • One exam, lasting 3 hours
  • Each unit attracts 50% of the total mark

Short course

  • One of 14 units available
  • One exam, lasting 1 hour 30 min, for 100% of the total mark
  • Can be 'topped up' to a full course, by taking another unit

Written exams

  • Externally assessed, attracting 72 marks
  • 1 hour 30 min for each unit
  • All six topics from the unit feature in some way in the exam
  • Consists of two parts:
    • Part A, four compulsory, short answer, stimulus response questions (48 marks)
    • Part B, one extended response question from choice of two (24 marks)
  • Students may quote from any version of the Bible

Religious Studies A units available

Each unit comprises six topics of study
Unit 1 Christianity Unit 8 Islam
Unit 2 Christianity: Ethics Unit 9 Islam: Ethics
Unit 3 Roman Catholicism Unit 10 Judaism
Unit 4 Roman Catholicism: Ethics Unit 11 Judaism: Ethics
Unit 5 St Mark's Gospel Unit 12 Buddhism
Unit 6 St Luke's Gospel Unit 13 Hinduism
Unit 7 Philosophy of Religion Unit 14 Sikhism
Prohibited combinations
Unit 1 and Unit 3 – Unit 2 and Unit 4 – Unit 5 and Unit 6