Where the marks actually sit
These two exam papers carry 150 marks in total: Assessment Unit A2 1, Shakespearean Genres (50 marks, 90 minutes, one question), and Assessment Unit A2 2, The Study of Poetry Pre 1900 and Unseen Poetry (100 marks, 120 minutes, two questions of 50 marks each). A2 1 gives you roughly 1.8 minutes per mark on a single essay, so there is time to plan properly. A2 2 runs faster, about 1.2 minutes per mark, split into two genuinely different tasks: a prepared poet in Section A, and a poem you have never seen before in Section B.
A2 1: the extract and the whole play carry equal marks
The Shakespeare question gives you a printed extract and asks you to write on your chosen play as a whole. The rubric splits the available marks equally between the extract and the rest of the play, and unbalanced answers, ones that spend most of their time on the printed lines and treat the wider play as an afterthought, or the reverse, are marked down for breaking that balance. Plan your 90 minutes so roughly half goes to close analysis of the extract and half to connecting it with events, characters or language elsewhere in the play.
The second recurring problem in A2 1 is narrative paraphrase: retelling what happens in the extract instead of building an argument driven by the question's stimulus statement. A script that only summarises character and plot, without discussing Shakespeare's dramatic methods, verse form, rhetoric, dramatic irony, staging, is capped at 30 out of 50. Method is not optional detail, it is half of what the question is asking for.
Context in A2 1 means genre knowledge, tragedy, comedy, problem play, romance, applied to the specific play, not a block of general Elizabethan history. Naming the genre and showing how a particular scene works within or against its conventions earns far more than a paragraph of background facts that never touches the text.
A2 2 Section A: poetry pre-1900, with context and connections
Section A tests a poet you have studied in depth, chosen from six prescribed options. It covers AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO4, so you need method (how the poem is built), context (drawing appropriately from outside the poem), and connections, within and between poems. If your chosen question involves comparing two poems, or an extract with the wider text, give both genuinely equal treatment. A companion poem that gets three sentences at the end of an otherwise strong answer costs marks under AO4 even when the main analysis is excellent.
A2 2 Section B: unseen poetry is method and interpretation, not context
Section B covers AO1, AO2 and AO5, not AO3, so you are not expected to bring in historical or biographical context for a poem you are seeing for the first time. What is being tested is your ability to read the poem cold and analyse how its form, structure, language and tone shape its meaning, along with an awareness that more than one reading of the poem is possible. Spend your reading time noticing shifts, in tone, in address, in structure, rather than trying to place the poem historically.
The 'how far do you agree' trap
Across both papers, essays that agree wholly and immediately with a stimulus statement, especially one containing an absolute word such as 'entirely', 'impossible' or 'throughout', are marked down. Top-band answers test the statement rather than accept it: address the absolute word directly, show where the statement holds, where it strains, and reach your own qualified judgement rather than a flat yes.
Closed-book conditions do not lower the bar for quotation. Examiners expect short, precise, syntactically integrated references to the text, worked into your sentences, rather than long remembered passages or vague paraphrase standing in for evidence.
CCEA conventions to know
A2 units carry synoptic assessment, meaning they build on the AS units and reward making connections across the whole course, not just the text in front of you. Extended answers are marked against banded mark schemes: an examiner places your response in a band first, based on how well it matches that band's method, context and interpretation descriptors, then fixes a specific mark within it.
Exam day plan
In A2 1, split your 90 minutes evenly between the extract and the wider play from the start, and name the play's genre early so your argument has a frame to work within. In A2 2, treat Section A and Section B as different tasks requiring different preparation: bring context and prior knowledge to Section A, and bring close, fast textual analysis with no outside material to Section B. In both papers, test the question's stimulus statement rather than simply agreeing with it, and keep every quotation short and precisely integrated into your sentence.