First of all I was very uninspired by yesterday’s Philosophy questions (my feeling was a bit ‘meh’). I think they were deceivingly difficult i.e ‘Analyse Aristotle’s four causes’ appears easy but you would really have to work on developing and formulating strong evaluation with so few words to work with in the question. What is also noticeable is that Teleological and POE both came up in the first year’s exam as well. What this means is that there is no correlation between first year and second year questions. I think the exam board are going out of their way to make the questions as unpredictable as possible and thus repeating a lot of the same areas (Bonhoeffer in DCT has come up three times already -there has only been four exams!). But that is now old news…let’s look ahead towards ethics.

Here are the previous questions from the first and second year’s exams:

All that we can learn from looking at these is how the questions are worded. The obvious gaps in the second year are: Sex ethics, SE and Euthanasia and Util and Business. However the way that the examiners are throwing in a few curve balls, you need to go into that exam ready for anything.

So I think potential question areas could be:

• Freud –conscience e.g. Aquinas and Freud’s views on guilt
• Specific on Meta e.g. emotivism is the best approach
• Definitely a Sex ethics Q
• Utilitarianism and business
• SE and euthanasia
• General Euthanasia Q e.g. SOL over QOL
• Specific NL, SE, Kant, Utilitarianism i.e. PP, Duty or Act vs Rule

Once again, as with my Philosophy predictions, I know this doesn’t take away many options. What it might help you do is prepare yourself for certain wordings of questions e.g. you might be prepared for a Q on euthanasia but could you do one specific on SOL for example?

For more tips and last minute ideas check out: Warning: Ethics Exam Approaching!! and Panic “My Exam is Tomorrow!” Must Read for Ethics (First and Second Year)

There are also Revision Packs to support any last minute revision. These include quizzes, glossaries and past exam questions to help structure your revision:

Good Luck everyone!