A-Level Economics · The method · DRAFT

Question-to-topic mapping: how to know what an economics exam question is really asking

Question-to-topic mapping is the first move in how I teach A-Level Economics: before writing a single word, you decide which topic on the specification the question is actually assessing, and everything after that — the diagram, the chains of reasoning, the structure — follows from that one decision. I am George Chantry: Oxford PPE, First Class, three Oxford prizes in economics, best mark in my year in Game Theory. After nine years and over 7,000 hours of one-to-one teaching, my view is that mis-mapping the question, not missing knowledge, is the largest single cause of lost marks at A-Level — because irrelevant material scores zero however good the economics inside it is. For most students the fastest gain available is not more content, but correctly identifying what they are being asked.

The problem: knowing the economics and still losing marks

Almost every parent who contacts me describes the same thing: their child revises hard, understands the subject, can talk about it at dinner — and comes home with a 12 out of 25. What has usually happened is that the student read the question, decided without noticing they were deciding what it was about, and wrote a competent answer to a different question. The mark scheme does not reward correct economics; it rewards correct economics on the topic assessed.

Two examples from my lessons make the point. One student handed me a school essay titled “How can the government solve the problem of congestion?” on which he had scored zero, having written extensively about traffic lights — when the question wanted regulation, indirect taxation and subsidies for public transport. Another wrote a very nearly A* answer to a fiscal policy question and included one paragraph on cost-push inflation. Cost-push inflation is not fiscal policy. That paragraph cost a grade.

Irrelevancy is the number one reason students lose marks. It is a massive drag on grades — the irrelevant sections score zero, they eat the clock, and they make the examiner doubt everything else you wrote.

What question-to-topic mapping actually is

The examiner is a professional reading a hundred scripts, quickly, and asking one thing of your answer: has this student recognised what the question is about? If it takes three paragraphs to work out where they think they are, the script does not go in the top pile. So the discipline I teach is to make the topic decision explicit, and to make it first. Mapping is a chain, and each link constrains the next:

1. Read the question and find the word doing the work — usually one word decides everything: “measures”, “efficient”, “provide”, “deficit”.
2. Name the topic. Which part of the specification is this? Not roughly — exactly. Fiscal policy, not “macro”.
3. Select the diagram that belongs to that topic. If you know the topic but cannot produce the diagram, that is the link we fix.
4. Draw the diagram and explain it with chains of reasoning — point, cause, consequence, at every shift.
5. Structure the answer into a clear two-sided argument — for and against, developed, not listed.
6. Evaluate — push back on your own analysis properly, rather than adding another thin point.
7. Reach a judgement — take a side, and say what it depends on.

Notice where the difficulty sits. Steps 4 to 7 are what schools spend most of their time on, and they are teachable. Steps 1 to 3 are where students actually fail, and are almost never taught explicitly. A student who has mastered steps 4 to 7 but cannot do steps 1 to 3 writes beautiful answers to the wrong questions.

One rule follows, because students get it backwards: on data-response papers, the extracts are verification tools, not the driver. Decide the topic first, then read the extracts through its lens to confirm it and select evidence. Let them choose the topic for you and you get dragged into whatever they happen to mention.

One worked example

The word doing the work is measures. That single word tells me this is not really a monopoly question at all: it is a competition-policy question wearing a monopoly costume. Edexcel rarely asks you to discuss monopoly in the abstract; it asks the broad question and expects you to pivot to policy underneath. That is the pattern in every past paper I have taught from.

The moment the topic is named, the toolkit opens by itself — price regulation, and promoting competition and contestability, with profit regulation and quality standards held in reserve. The diagram then follows from the topic rather than from inspiration: the monopoly diagram, the firm profit-maximising where MR = MC at a high price and restricted quantity. Once that is on the page, every measure reduces to one sentence — this policy pulls the firm back towards the allocatively efficient point where AR = MC — which organises the entire essay.

That is the whole of the mapping work, and it takes about forty seconds. Everything after it is ordinary competent economics. The student who spends those forty seconds and the student who does not are writing two different essays.

Why students go off topic

After a student of mine wrote a genuinely good answer to a question that was not on the paper and scored 4 out of 25, I could see four causes, usually present as a mixture: recognition of that topic was not yet automatic; he felt stronger on a neighbouring topic and steered towards the comfortable one; he committed to writing before he had committed to a topic; and he was unlucky with what came up. Only the last is outside our control.

How I diagnose it, and how I fix it

The diagnostic is deliberately fast. I put twenty to thirty past-paper questions in front of a student in quick succession and ask two things only: what topic is this, and what diagram would you use? No essays, no writing. Within minutes I can see which connections are missing, and whether the break is at question-to-topic or topic-to-diagram. The fix is then disciplined repetition on exactly the broken links:

When a student maps wrongly I do not tell them the answer. I hand back a variant and tap them gently towards the right frame with questions of my own, so the correction happens in their head. Students need stabilisers in their own minds, not in mine.

Where the method came from

I had this problem myself. At Oxford, the student a year above me who had taken the best mark in the year told me: for every technical paper, know the question types and know how to solve each type. So I spent a fortnight mapping every question in every past paper back to the topic it assessed, using the lecture structure as the map of the syllabus — then began every answer by naming the question type before writing anything else. My marks moved considerably: the best mark in college in several papers, and the best mark in my year in Game Theory.

The lesson is the one I now teach. In an exam, creativity is a liability. The job is to identify the topic assessed and deliver a complete, disciplined rendition of it — like a doctor, paid to diagnose accurately and prescribe the standard treatment, not to be inventive.

What it does to marks

This is the fastest-moving thing I teach, because it changes what a student sees rather than what they know. The most striking case on my records is a student who went from a C to an A* after two lessons spent almost entirely on mapping — first every diagram to its topic, then the chain backwards: question to topic to diagram to opening chain of reasoning. No new content was taught. Across my students the average improvement is around two grades, 82% of my Edexcel students achieved an A or A* in the 2024–25 exams, and A* has been the most common grade they achieve.

Mapping is not the whole method — it feeds into chains of reasoning, and sits inside the three diagnostic categories. But it comes first, it is cheapest to fix, and for most students it is where the missing grades are hiding.