Four ways to evaluate at A Level

Evaluation is worth about 30 per cent of the marks on Paper 2 and Paper 4, and it is the part students find hardest to start. The fix is to stop treating evaluation as an opinion and start treating it as four questions you ask about your own argument.

First: how big is the effect?

You have just explained that something happens. Now ask how much.

A rise in interest rates reduces consumer spending. By how much? That depends on how many households have loans, how much of their income goes on repayments, and how confident they feel. If most people in the economy have little debt, the effect is small.

Useful phrases: the size of the effect depends on, this matters more when, the impact is likely to be small if.

Elasticity is your best friend here. If demand is inelastic, a price change does little to quantity, so a tax meant to change behaviour will not do much. Bringing elasticity into an evaluation is one of the quickest ways to lift an answer.

Second: how long does it take?

Short run and long run often give opposite answers, and saying so is proper evaluation.

A currency depreciation makes exports cheaper, so the current account should improve. In the short run it often gets worse first, because contracts are already signed and buyers take time to switch. The improvement comes later.

Training workers raises productivity, but nobody is retrained in a month. A government that needs unemployment down before the year ends cannot rely on it.

Say when the effect arrives, not just that it arrives.

Third: what does the argument assume?

Every piece of theory rests on assumptions. Naming one and asking whether it holds is high level evaluation.

Common ones worth questioning:

• Other things staying equal. In the real economy several things move at once.
• Firms aiming only at maximum profit. Some chase market share or survival instead.
• People having good information and acting on it. Often they do not, which is one reason merit goods are under-consumed.
• Resources moving easily between uses. Workers who lose factory jobs do not become software engineers.
• The policy being carried out well. A subsidy still has to reach the right producers, and a tax still has to be collected.

Fourth: who gains and who loses?

Almost no policy is good for everybody. Splitting the effects by group gives you something concrete to weigh.

Run through the groups: consumers, producers, workers, the government, people on low incomes, and other countries.

Take a national minimum wage. Workers who keep their jobs earn more. Workers who lose their jobs, or never get hired, lose. Firms face higher costs, and small firms feel it most. The government may collect more income tax and pay out less in benefits. Saying all of that is far stronger than saying a minimum wage has advantages and disadvantages.

Fitting it into the essay

Do not save these for the last paragraph. Use them as you go, then bring them together at the end.

A paragraph that evaluates well often looks like this: make the point, explain the chain, then turn it with however or but this depends on, then say what it depends on and why that matters.

Your final judgement should pick one of the four and lean on it. For example: on balance the policy is likely to work, but only in the long run, so a government facing a problem this year should not rely on it alone.

Two habits that help

When you revise a topic, write down two limits of it on the same page as the theory. By the exam you will have a limit ready for everything.

When you finish a practice essay, underline every sentence that evaluates. If there are fewer than four, you have written a knowledge answer, whatever the content is worth.