English A subject report · May 2009

May 2009 extended essay reports Page 1 © International Baccalaureate Organization 2009 ENGLISH A1 Overall grade boundaries Grade: E D C B A Mark range: 0 - 7 8 - 15 16 - 22 23 - 28 29 - 36 The range and suitability of the work submitted Examiners were generally pleased with this first set of essays written to the new criteria, although there were a few cases of work submitted with the old (green) coversheets which appeared to have been written with the old criteria in mind. There has been no marked change in the general standard of the work submitted and, if anything, a slight impro vement. The best essays were well up to the level of first -year tertiary work and the proportion of essays in the B category was slightly higher than in previous sessions. At the other end of the scale there were still examples, though not too many, of wor k so poor that it should never have been submitted. Topics ranged widely, from Shakespeare to Stoppard and Beckett, from Jane Austen to Anne Michaels and Cormac McCarthy, and from dystopian fiction to Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. There was a preference for modern or contemporary texts, though the nineteenth century was also well represented. As usual the novel predominated, but some students took up the challenge of poetry and drama: there were excellent essays comparing Milton and Blake ’, and the idea of de velopment in poems by Wordsworth and Yevtushenko; there were original attempts at theatre involving plays such as The Changeling , and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead . Where candidates chose to follow well -trodden paths by writing on such modern cl assics as The Grapes of Wrath , Animal Farm and The Lord of the Flies , the results were usually no better than satisfactory; and the same was true in the case of popular contemporary works like J. K. Rowling’s, where the candidates’ obvious enthusiasm and detailed knowledge tended to produce no more than uncritical expositions of theme and character. Comparisons between texts were often more profitable —for instance, the treatment of madness in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea —but only when there was a point to the comparison and the texts