Undergraduate Examination and Assessment

In the outline papers, candidates may cross-fertilize between British and European and World History papers, and may use material acquired in preparing for Optional Subjects and Paper IV options in order to broaden and deepen their arguments. But it should be remembered that the focus and scope of questions in outline papers will often be broader than in other types of paper, so answers in outline papers should not be dominated by material from other papers. Remember that you are trying to impress the examiners: breadth, depth, and making connections will achieve this, but recycling material (writing out the same information or argument extensively more than once) and narrowness of focus will not.

Candidates are encouraged to develop an integrated understanding of the history they have studied while at Oxford, and to make connections between material in different papers. There are only two formal restraints on this general desirability of cross-fertilizing between courses, in the Regulations B6.9:

i. Candidates may not answer in any other paper, with the exception of Disciplines of History, questions that fall very largely within the scope of their thesis.
ii. Candidates should not choose a thesis that substantially reworks material studied in the Further or Special Subjects, and should demonstrate familiarity with and use of substantially different and additional primary sources.

Clause ‘i’ should NOT be taken to mean that a Thesis cannot be written within the field of the outline papers which the candidate has already studied . Of course candidates should not repeat substantially the same material in the Thesis as in the essays (see further below on repetition); but the different scope of Outline essays and Theses in any case make this unlikely.

Clause ‘ii’ is self-explanatory: the Thesis MUST be based on sources largely different from those set for the Further or Special Subject that the candidate is taking. This does not preclude using some of the same sources, but the majority of them must be different.

More generally candidates should not actually repeat material between different assessments: writing out the same information and ideas extensively reduces the extent to which you can impress the examiners with the breadth of your knowledge and understanding. But you are encouraged to allude to material from elsewhere which will deepen and enrich your arguments.

In Disciplines of History candidates may use whatever material they have to make their case; but again they would be unwise to write out too extensively material and ideas already expounded elsewhere in the various assessments. Equally, however, they can summarize and allude to material used elsewhere in order to enrich their arguments.