How can I find past O/A Level Curriculum + Exam Papers 1982 / 1983 / 1985 ...

[MsAdaLovelace]

Hello Mumsnetters,

Can you help!

Andy idea how I can find past O' Level and A' Level Curriculum/Course information and Exam Papers for 1982 / 1983 / 1985 ...

I am going down a rabbit hole!

Thank You MN!

Oops apologies just spotted a typo!

Chaucer : A Canterbury Tales

And this was in the original old English too!

Which one tho!

My year did The Knight’s Tale for A level which is the most dull and tedious one!

@clary

CHAUCER was for O LEVEL ... that I do remember definitely not A LEVEL and I thank my lucky stars for that!

Will see if I can remember ...

I did JMB A level 1987 so a bit later. French A level texts were Premier de Cordee and Noeud de Viperes. English O and A levels included Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, A Passage to India, Murder in the Cathedral, To Kill a Mockingbird, Poems of TS Elliott, War Poetry, Sean O Casey plays, Animal Farm, Brave New World. I remember the other English sets did Jane Austen and Chaucer whilst we did a between the wars time period.

Hmm that surprises me. It was flagged as a massive thing about A level English that you had to study Chaucer (generally viewed as being a massive challenge). Deffo not O level; for that we had 1 Shakespeare, then we did poems and Silas Marner. Boards must have varied quite a lot.

Thank you @Michele09!

Appreciate everyone responding and I am transported back to those long summer nights and revision and the long, long, long summer holidays we all had after exams!

x

Ah looking at 1984 Eng lit, you had to do Shakespeare and could choose Chaucer. But why would you when you could have chosen Far from the Madding Crowd or The Crucible instead? lol

ETA: I am loving the French translation :) not easy at all. Translate to French: “He arrived at the station at the last minute – too late to buy a ticket”

I did O'levels at independent school and kept my exam papers (not sure where they are though and not the same board you are looking for). A-level papers at state school I had to hand them in. Didn't know why there were different rules (did wonder if whether it was the fact we paid for the O-level exams)

Well, so sure it was O LEVEL, exam year 1983 and A LEVEL year was 1985 but I may just be remembering it all the wrong way round!

My post about Shakespeare and Chaucer and the option to do Hardy or Miller instead of Chaucer was O level btw – so you could well have done Chaucer for O level @MsAdaLovelace. No idea why a school would choose that tho!

ETA: yeh just checked 1984 Eng lit A level and you had to do Chaucer.

Why would they do that to us!

This is an independent girls' school too and the Headmistress was pure evil so that is probably why we had to do CHAUCER!

Our English teacher was a dream and I bet that was not her choice!

I did O-levels in 1983 (different board). The texts we did were Twelfth Night, Jane Eyre and Tennyson poems

I remember studying Le Silence de la mer for French a'level.

Just realised what ETA means in this context!

ETA - Edited To Add

NOT // ETA - Estimated Time of Arrival

That might make a great Mumsnet Thread. Just sayin'...

Thank you everyone for responding, much appreciated.

Might do a separate thread for French A LEVEL texts to see if it rings bells with any MNs.

You’ve covered it all I think but I did A level English literature in 1985 and studied

The Wasteland - TS Eliot
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Great Expectations
King Lear
Richard II
Sons and Lovers - DH Lawrence

Great memories

O yes and Tess of the D’Urbevilles

I did Chaucer at O level, but that was in 1969. I keep finding my O level papers and losing them again, currently they’re lost. I was surprised by the lack of diagrams on Maths papers where you would now expect to find them.

THANK YOU @PuppyMonkey and @borntobequiet ... yes it is all coming back to me now ... I still seem to have a blank with the rest of the A LEVEL texts!

Thank You @claryyou are a star!

1986 Cambridge A level English.
Shakespeare paper. First there are what we called context questions with extracts but DC say that's not what context means now. You had to do two plays and answer two context questions. Then 2 essays:

Chaucer and major authors paper. Part 1 is extracts and you must do Chaucer and one other. Then 2 essays so you cover 3 works in total. We had Wife of Bath, Wuthering Heights and Persuasion.

We also did a Renaissance paper because we were the class that chose not to do coursework. No-one said the alternative would be Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare sonnets, the Changeling and the Revenger's Tragedy! But in fact it was more fun than we thought.
What my kids are surprised by is how many works we did and how we didn't have to compare works to other works. DD1 wrote about A Streetcar Names Desire in relation to Duchess of Malfi.

If anyone wants delve further in to the A LEVEL texts for FRENCH and ENGLISH LITERATURE I did a separate thread on this ...

What did you study for A Level FRENCH and ENGLISH LITERATURE?

It has been a delight to go through all the posts MN!

Thank you.

x