Introduction

The Critical Perspectives Exam is split into two parts.

Section A: Theoretical Evaluation of Production

Section B: Contemporary Media Issues

The first section is split into two questions, each worth 25 points.

Question One is a reflection of your skills development and allows you to refer to all of your practical work over the last 18 months, including unassessed work such as that undertaken during the induction period.

Question Two is a reflection of your individual engagement with some key media concepts such as genre, narrative, audience, representation and media language.

Section B is your opportunity to engage in some of the contemporary debates and issues in the media industry today. There are 6 themes and in the exam there is a choice of two questions under each theme.

The way we will be covering this is by splitting the class into project teams that will become experts in one of the themes, the team will produce an information film on their topic that will act as a revision guide. All teams will also teach their topic to the rest of the class. This should ensure that in the exam every student has a choice of more than one theme.

Each theme has 4 prompt questions that give an idea of some of the key debates within that media issue and it is also important that each project team has examples from at least two different sections of the media to illustrate their key points, i.e. music industry, press, film, video games, internet.

You will be assigned to a project team and that project team will create its own blog in order to house all of your research.

You will work in 6 teams to find information for, research, plan and create an info film.

The purpose of the info film is to act as a revision guide for yourselves and the rest of the class.

It must include a guide as to what essential elements need to be included in preparation for the exam, textual examples and make reference to contemporary media theorists.