EJC 2025 GP Preliminary Examination P1 SAS

2025 EJC General Paper Preliminary Examinations Paper 1 Examiners’ Report OVERALL COMMENTS FOR CONTENT The overall quality of responses was commendable. There were few instances where question analysis was lacking, such that the majority of the responses were able to answer the question requirements with some success. There were a number of strong scripts that demonstrated all the hallmarks of a good essay like strong content knowledge, an in-depth understanding of current realities and nuanced evaluation. Most responses showed at least a basic understanding of essay writing skills though the quality of writing varies quite widely. Question Analysis Most scripts showed competence in basic question analysis skills. The majority of the scripts were able to competently identify the point of contention and were able to explain clearly the point of contention in the paragraph development. However, examiners noted that candidates were still struggling when the essay questions came with more conditions or qualifiers that required students to deal with more complex ideas in their arguments (e.g. Q4 and Q6). Candidates also had difficulties with abstract ideas like ‘offence’ (Q7) and ‘trust’ (Q8). Content knowledge The quality of content knowledge displayed in the scripts varied widely. The majority of the scripts demonstrated basic competence in content knowledge, showing that the majority of the students have taken their tutors’ advice to go through the Resource Packages prior to the examination. However, the scope of knowledge remained limited especially for questions that require specific content knowledge (e.g. Q4, Q5, Q7 and Q8). For such questions, students’ understanding was limited to a few countries (e.g. USA and Singapore) or common examples (e.g. Social media featured heavily in all questions, regardless of the topic). Due to the limited examples, many arguments were over-generalised from these limited examples when students over-extended the examples beyond what these examples logically represented. It did not help when the cited examples were also limited to extreme situations. Conceptual understanding featured in many of the scripts. The majority of candidates made deliberate efforts to weave in trends, context, connections or implications into their arguments. These efforts gave depth and nuance to the arguments. However, some candidates did this in a mechanical manner by ‘name-dropping’ some standard terms associated with trends, context, connections or implications without any due consideration if these terms were appropriate or relevant to the overa