Do you need historiography for Germany Questions? Part 2

Again, Gabby, I think the guy's advice is a bit suspect. I think that using no more than 5 historians and paraphrasing their work is too general a piece of advice.

For instance, how could you answer "well" a question on Hitler's foreign policy without dealing with the different schools of historical thought?

I can see what the guy is getting at, he doesn't want students copying out slabs of other people's opinions and saying that is their essay. I think that advice is to keep the less able students, who could get themselves into trouble trying to deal with historiography that they don't really understand, out of trouble.

I agree with the paraphrasing, but short quotes can be valuable too.

All of this down-playing of historiography comes from a crisis that hit Modern History a few years back when the numbers doing the subject started to drop. The word had started to spread that you couldn't hope to get a Band 6 unless your had plenty of good historiography. This meant that only the kids doing History Extension in most schools were in with a chance. This wasn't really the case with a number of questions, but the idea was enough to scare plenty of people off the subject. So, you now get these people "stressing" to students that it is possible to get a Band 6 without historiography. But, as I have already said, I think that it isn't the case with a lot of questions and I think people can be a bit misleading, because they are afraid of losing students or scaring the ones that they have doing the subject already.