School Assessment: Sources, Evidence and Historical Argument
What school assessment rewards
SACE Stage 2 Modern History school assessment is built around a small number of skills that recur across every topic: source analysis, evaluation of evidence, explanation of change and continuity, and construction of an argued response to a question. Your topic content (for example, revolutions, the Cold War, decolonisation, or the two World Wars) supplies the raw material, but marks come from how you use it.
You must understand the difference between primary and secondary sources, and between a source's origin, purpose, audience, context and reliability. Reliability is not the same as accuracy: a propaganda poster may be perfectly reliable as evidence of the regime's intended message and quite unreliable as evidence of what actually happened. Questions often ask you to distinguish these, so make the distinction explicit.
Traps that appear in questions
- Narrative drift. Retelling the event instead of answering the question. If the question asks 'to what extent', a narrative answer caps your mark.
- Source description instead of analysis. Saying what a source shows rather than what it reveals, why it was made, and what it leaves out.
- Unsupported judgement. Asserting an interpretation without evidence from your own knowledge or the sources.
- Ignoring the counter-argument. Strong responses acknowledge the strongest opposing view and answer it.
Rule of thumb
For any source question, use a three-move structure: what it says, why it says it (origin, purpose, audience), what that means for the question. For any essay, state a clear position in the introduction, signpost two or three lines of argument, and return to the question in every paragraph's final sentence.
Worked example
Question: 'Explain why the Treaty of Versailles was resented in Germany.' A weak answer lists terms. A strong answer groups terms into categories (territorial, military, economic, and the war-guilt clause), explains the mechanism by which each caused resentment, and evaluates which mattered most and to whom.