Hi,
IR was a tough subject to pass this year. Is anyone here who has taken this subject at university level, or has taught it or knows someone who does? Can you figure out what we might have missed? Some technicality, some parlance, some way of doing it? What can we do to improve our IR papers?

Please do not debate about the scoring trends or how FPSC might have decided to fail us all because some people still managed to pass it. So there must be something wrong from my end.
I hope to find some teacher as well, till then some kind of guidance would be of help.

Thank you

Well, those who managed to pass this time around have marks in 70s, 80s or do they have marks in 120s and 130s just like the last year?

Questions and paper checkers change. A lenient marker might not be making a fuss over small mistakes. The problem is how to prepare to make sure ke tough marker se bhi pass ho jayein. Mera yehi sawal tha.

__________________
...Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.

"must be something wrong from my end"

Its refreshing to see someone on this thread holding themselves accountable

Hey
I have studied the subject at university level. As per my own personal experience:
We had to take four courses in a semester(hence, four teachers). Now, for every teacher we had to pursue a different strategy with regard to the style as well as the content of the answers. And it was not just your simple change of style to accomodate for the teacher's style but rather an almost 180 degree change, since following one teacher's desired style could get you a meagre 30 percent or less in the exam that was to be checked by the other teacher. I don't know if that can be applied in the case of css but that is how we went through the university level IR. So, imho, luck does play a role one way or the other. I could write an answer that would have been deemed outstanding if teacher A checked and would have been rubbished if the teacher B checked. So :/

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Zainab s

They wanted to break the trend by this.
Now I believe many won't be opting IR...
Nothing went wrong from our side.

Zainabd, thank you for starting this trend.
I'm stunned too see the marks this year
Personally I.R has been heralded as a no-brainer for students/aspirants, especially recommended to students from bba, engineering, medical background desoite having to firm foundation or previous knowledge about the subject.
I feel this is one of the reasons for such a low score, people opt for I.R without thinking about their natural aptitude and dispositions.
I am thinking about going for Physics instead of I.R due to same reason

I know that a high number of students opting a subject could be a factor but if a paper is well-presented then any examiner, no matter how tough or lenient, is not going to fail the student. Maybe, they would give lesser marks than usual but failing a student is a huge thing- the importance of which, I am sure, is not lost on the paper checkers.
Anyways, I have to do introspection and have my answers checked by those who know more than me. Finding excuses won't get me anywhere.

If you want to opt Physics, go for it. I wish you good luck.

__________________
...Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.

Post a rough outline of any question of the IR-1 that you had attempted...and maybe we can assess what went wrong...

I am not a IR expert or anything, actually a newbie myself but i think i scored well. Paper 1 70 and paper 2 43(got whipped in paper 2). I had no background in I.R and i just studied 2 books Globalization of world politics and understanding international relations. The thing i want to share is that atleast 2 questions in paper 1 seemed to be taken entirely from the first of those books. As in the arguments asked were those which are repeated again and again in Baylis' book.
So maybe sometimes its not really about scoring trend so much as examiner chosing a particular book with its set of arguments and awarding marks to those who answer accordingly
Thats just a guess. I dont know what you folks or anyone else wrote in their papers. To me attempting paper A seemed very easy and i got a distinct impression that that psper was set from the book i read. Now its quite possible that you folks felt the same about your resource material resonating with exam questions.