CCEA AS English Literature

How Dracula is examined. Question 6 offers two statements, (a) and (b). Each is followed by: “With reference to Stoker’s narrative methods, and relevant contextual information, show to what extent you agree with the above statement.” One hour, closed book, 50 marks. Assessment objectives AO1, AO2, AO3 (context) and AO5 (other interpretations); AO5 drives the question. AS level only.

Browse the CCEA AS 2 question records. Exact question excerpts, shortened prompts and report-based summaries are labelled separately. Open the original paper for the complete instruction, extract and rubric.

Read each year’s questions before its feedback. The wording labels distinguish recorded excerpts from summaries that still need checking against the paper. General-paper and unseen-passage comments are identified separately; a report may not discuss every question listed.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• 2022 (a) Lucy: many knew little about Lucy and drifted to Mina. Better answers saw early strength, as Lucy pushes against social constraints, which is lost once she is bitten. Some context was shaky (Lucy as the archetypal New Woman). Few explored Stoker’s Gothic detail or his use of contrast.

• 2022 (b) foreigners: only a minority wrote convincingly. The best weighed the negative foreigners (the Count, the vampire women) against the positive ones, Van Helsing and Quincey Morris. Many answered an older question on “fear of foreigners” instead; some wrongly called Renfield a foreigner. Context was often unfocused.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• 2023 (a) prejudice (p. 13): candidates found it hard. The best showed the novel both challenging prejudice (Harker’s curiosity about Transylvania) and reinforcing it (madness, race, class). Many “ignored the key term ‘challenges’”; a few did not understand “prejudice”.

• 2023 (b) Harker: self-contradiction between paragraphs was common; labels such as damsel in distress were unconvincing.

• 2023 general (p. 10): focus on broad narrative methods (form, structure, motifs) rather than micro-methods such as alliteration; avoid one-word quotations; recognise that characters develop, to avoid contradictory absolute claims.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• 2024 (a) relevance: the best showed relevance through the outsider, good and evil, and racism. Many ignored “relevance” or let context swamp the text.

• 2024 (b) Mina: the common argument was that Mina is powerless when attacked but pivotal to the Count’s defeat. Examiners criticised answers that branded Van Helsing’s “man’s brain” praise simply as misogyny, which misunderstands 19th-century attitudes.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• 2025 (a) defeat: strong answers treated the typewriter, phonograph, railway timetables and telegrams as symbols of rationality, modernity and collective effort, set against the old world. Weak answers took technology in isolation or too literally, missing how it works alongside faith, superstition, Van Helsing’s religious insight and Mina’s intelligence.

• 2025 (b) Van Helsing: strong answers judged success broadly (leadership, emotional insight, combining science with superstition, his grief over Lucy). Weak answers made him either infallible or sexist.

• 2025 general: attend to broad narrative methods rather than isolated micro-techniques, and keep context concise and relevant. Use the specification and marking grid to establish the assessed requirements.

• 2023 – mark scheme (mirror), pp. 31–32. Source details.

• (a) prejudice: candidates must examine the relationship between “Dracula”, “challenges” and “prejudice”, and may argue the novel reinforces prejudice. Narrative methods: Harker’s journal as an open-minded travelogue; Seward’s phonograph case notes on Renfield, partly reinforcing and partly challenging prejudice about lunacy; multiple middle-class English narrators whose views may be prejudiced; dialect characters and class; physiognomy; the hyperbolic praise of Mina. Contexts: empire on the wane; fears of immigration, other races and disease; asylums and the 1845 Lunacy Act; the New Woman against the Angel in the House.

• (b) Harker: Harker frames the novel and kills the Count; contexts include the Victorian hero and railway travel.

Open the candidate-answer catalogue for links, reported marks, page references and what to learn from each response.

• CCEA’s “Exemplifying Examination Performance” pack for 2023 exists but could not be opened. Not verified whether it contains a Dracula script.

• The AS 2 Dracula eGuide (2019) gives a sample question (“In Dracula, Stoker challenges the typical nineteenth-century view of women”) and examiner advice, but no scripts. It covers some biography (theatre manager and critic, civil service, childhood illness, muscular Christianity), not Ireland, the Lyceum by name or Bram’s research notes. Source details.

CCEA requires “relevant contextual information” in every question, but its examiners insist that the text has primacy over the context. Context must serve the statement’s key terms and should be concise; assessment requirements should be checked against the specification and the mark scheme for the paper. They penalise context that swamps the text, anachronistic judgements (calling 1890s attitudes simply “misogynistic”), and shaky labels (Lucy as the archetypal New Woman). The mark scheme’s contexts are historical and institutional (empire, immigration, lunacy law, the New Woman), not biographical.

Open the board’s assessment-materials library. The source register records individual reports, mark schemes and access notes. Sources for studying and teaching Dracula.

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