send work to moderators on time, and it was mid-June before all of the samples were finally received for moderation.
Centres should not use any form of postal or delivery service where a signature is required for the receipt of documents or work. Without a signature, the work may be returned to a sorting office or dispatch office at some distance from the moderator’s home address and this can lead to delays in the moderation process.
Candidates’ work should not be sent in bulky folders and it would be helpful if pages were numbered and all work was removed from plastic wallets. Candidate names and numbers must be recorded on the front of the Candidate Record Forms.
Task Choices
The most frequently attempted tasks were those based on Tourism (35% of work seen), Water on the Land (32%), the Coastal Zone (12%), Changing Urban Environments (7%) and the Living
World (6%). Centres successfully contextualised the chosen task so that their candidates were able to produce valid investigations. There were some instances of centres attempting a task from the incorrect year of submission or deviating from the task, although not to a degree that invalidated the work produced.
The Investigations
Many investigations exceeded the guidance of 2000 words and some were far too long. This was particularly evident where very able candidates had access to ICT for the majority, or all, of the time allowed for the task.
Centres are advised to ensure that all of their candidates keep to the guidance of 2000 words.
Shorter and more succinct pieces of work tend to be more tightly focused, they are easier for centres to mark and they are more manageable from the candidates’ perspective. The more concise style has led, in some instances, to higher quality writing and more attention to detail. It has also been found that candidates who have produced excessively lengthy investigations have often disadvantaged themselves in other ways. Many of these candidates have written additional material that is not creditworthy. For example, some wrote at great length on aspects of the background of the study area that had no bea