u/Gold_Village5950

Hello! I just got my exam scripts for May 2026 and I’m happy to say that I got 100/100 on my A2 components for literature. The texts I studied were Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, A Handful of Dust, The Underground Railroad for AS and Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Pride and Prejudice and Beloved for A2, alongside some basic literary theory. I know these are more than the syllabus requires but our teacher wanted to allow us “choice” in our exam questions.

Anyways for a syllabus that is soooo underrepresented in the international A-Level pool, it would seem so alienating at times to study for 9695 literature with absolutely no resources online or on YT. Couple it with the serious academic demands of this syllabus, it can be quite difficult.

I’m currently preparing for my BSc Biology at Imperial College London!

Prospective and current 9695 students, AMA!

How did your exam go?? I did the sonnets, and was so glad the sonnet 116 was there for the passage based question. It was pretty insightful. I don’t know why, but the beloved part a question on Beloved was so easy, yet I chose to do part b (natural response :( ), realising midway that I hated it and didn’t know what to discuss, then went back to answering part a 😭😭😭. I was able to write only 4 pages, and the points were rather limited, I talked about hauntology and Jacques Derrida, and how the past comes to haunt, John Leonard and ghostly nature of beloved, gothic genre, multiple perspectives (polyphony), and African Myth Akibu (don’t ask me how, but I related it to beloved somehow). Wasn’t able to give a conclusion tho, but to hell with that, I’ve actually never seen examiner give a shit about conclusions lol. How did your paper go? What do you think the grade thresholds will be??

Paper 4 is tomorrow, and for some reason I’ve gotten exam anxiety, thinking the way I write essays isn’t correct. For context I do Shakespeare’s Sonnets for Poetry and Beloved for Prose. How do you write your essays to b or a part questions??

Anyone doing Sonnets for 9695 Paper 42? What kind of questions do you expect? How would you write an essay for a b question.