PLAY · GCSE · AQA 8145

Weigh it.

Drag weight onto competing causes and watch an essay spine build itself, rebuild a source from its provenance to test its usefulness, then put 1933 back in order.

Weigh the causes, build the essay

FIG. 01 · CAUSATION · AO1 / AO2
Relative weight you have given to each cause A bar for each factor, longest first. The same ranking is written out underneath as an essay plan.

Your thesis

Move a slider to start building an argument.

Paragraph spine

Conclusion

Both are on the AQA spec: Germany 1890–1945 and Conflict and tension 1918–1939.

Lead factor share
Argument shape

Why weighting is the whole skill. A list of causes is a Level 2 answer. What lifts it is a hierarchy — saying which factor mattered most, and showing the others working through it. Every sentence this widget writes is one you could actually use: a topic sentence that answers the question, the evidence that proves it, and a link back to the judgement.

Build a source, then test it

FIG. 02 · SOURCE UTILITY · AO3

Useful for what it says
Useful for what it is

Usefulness is never a property of the source alone. Change the question and the same source changes value.

Overall utility
Main limitation

The mistake that caps your mark. "This source is biased, so it is not useful" throws away every mark on the question. A propaganda poster is close to useless as a measure of what Germans believed and extremely useful as evidence of what the regime wanted them to believe. Say what the source is useful for, using its provenance, and you are in the top band.

Put the dictatorship back in order

FIG. 03 · ANALYTICAL NARRATIVE · 1933–34
    Order them earliest to latest, then check. Use the ▲ / ▼ buttons — they work from the keyboard.
    In position
    Longest run

    Each event, once you check, explains what it made possible next. That chain — not the dates — is what an analytical narrative question is actually asking for.

    Eighteen months. That is how long it took to go from a coalition chancellor with three Nazis in cabinet to a one-party state whose army swore a personal oath to Hitler. Examiners want you to show the steps linking: emergency powers made the election unfair, the unfair election made the Enabling Act possible, the Enabling Act made everything after it legal.

    Six real questions

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