Sixth Form Entry Booklet

31 We will aim to fulfil this requirement by taking most students on a 4-day residential field trip to the Blencathra Field Study Centre in the Lake District, usually over a long weekend in March. This supports the glaciation, life support systems and space and place units as well as teaching you techniques you can use in your independent investigation. There will also be opportunities for you to conduct local fieldwork closer to home. This is a 2-year course examined at the end by 3 written papers and a non-examined assessment: Paper 1. Physical Systems – 1 hours 30 minutes (22%) Section A: Glaciated Landscapes Section B: Earth’s Life Support Systems Paper 2: Human Interactions - 1 hours 30 minutes (22%) Section A: Changing spaces, Making Places Section B: Power and Boarders 1. Global Migration 2. Power and Borders Both papers will require the use of geographical skills such as the interpretation of OS Maps, photos and data sets. There will be a variety of question types from multiple choice and short answer to extended prose. Paper 3. Geographical Debates – 2 hours and 30 minutes (36%) 1. Disease Dilemmas 2. Hazardous Earth Non-Examined Assessment – NEA (20%) This is a 3000 - 4000 word Independent Investigation. You will carry out and write up a piece of your own fieldwork on a question or issue you have developed relating to any part of the Course Specification content, and which must include data collected in the field. It will be internally marked and then externally moderated. Higher Education Geography is about making sense of the world around us by looking at the social, economic, political and environmental aspects of a given issue. It is about gathering information from a wide variety of sources and writing reports summarising the main points of an argument. These sorts of analytical skills are highly transferable and prepare you very well for a wide variety of degree courses from straight Geography to Environmental Science or Geology on the physical side to Business Studies, Management or Law on the Human side. Geography degrees cover a huge range of topics from the Geography of Disease to the Geopolitics of the Middle East and can be studied within an Arts or Science Faculty.