Question Bank

Practice questions in the Scholarship style: open, conceptual, and built around a tension you must take a position on. These are written for this site — they are not past NZQA questions. The real papers from 2023–2025 are in the archive.

A fan of question cards with one prompt turned face-up

How the real exam asks questions

Every recent paper follows the same pattern: three fixed question territories, each offering four quotations or statements (usually from film-makers, journalists, or industry figures) — you choose one and argue with it. Looking across the 2023–2025 question booklets, the recurring quotation themes are:

QuestionTerritoryRecurring quotation themes, 2023–2025
One Media and wider society — analyse the development of a medium / media industry and the factors shaping it Old media adapting or dying · AI as tool vs threat to industries · whether social media now shapes mainstream culture and should be regulated · journalism's role in democracy · the state of NZ's screen sector and its storytellers · streaming economics and artist exploitation · formula vs originality
Two Media production — one medium and its production context, including your own production experience Genre conventions informing (or being subverted by) creative decisions · making audiences care · learning through making · detail vs big picture · personal voice and unique perspective · making for yourself vs for an audience · trust, risk, and guesswork in production
Three Close reading of media texts — genre, readings, representation Media as a way of understanding the world · texts that make people think, not just dream · identity and its constraints · representing lives rarely seen on screen · entertaining before educating · breaking rules to tell stories in new ways · authenticity and what audiences sense

What this means for practice: you can't predict the quotations, but you can predict the territories — and the themes orbit the same big ideas this site covers (media change, AI, platforms, journalism, NZ industry, genre, representation, audience). Prepare three separate evidence banks (one per question — material cannot be reused), then practise attaching them to any quotation thrown at you.

Practice questions by theme

How to use these: Most of the value is in planning, not writing. For each question: 10 minutes — unpack it, write a thesis, list four paragraph moves with examples and theory. Write one full essay per week from your plans (see the Study Plan). Never plan the same question twice — flexibility is the skill. Then do the same with the real quotations in the past papers.

Media and society

  1. "Media does not record social change; it produces it." Evaluate this claim.
  2. To what extent is a shared society possible without shared media?
  3. "The most significant media effects are the ones nobody notices." Discuss.
  4. Has the fragmentation of media audiences strengthened or weakened media's social power? Argue your position.

Representation

  1. "Representation only changes when the people behind the camera change." How far do you agree?
  2. Evaluate the claim that visibility is not the same as power, with reference to the representation of one or more groups in media.
  3. "Stereotypes persist because they are profitable." Discuss.
  4. To what extent has media in Aotearoa New Zealand moved from representing Māori to Māori representing themselves — and what difference does that distinction make?

Industry

  1. "Every media text is the answer to an economic question." Evaluate.
  2. Should governments fund media content in small markets like Aotearoa New Zealand? Argue your position with reference to specific funding models.
  3. "Concentration of media ownership matters less now that anyone can publish." Discuss.
  4. To what extent have streaming services changed what stories get told, rather than merely how stories are delivered?

Audience

  1. "The active audience was always a myth — we just changed who profits from the activity." Evaluate.
  2. To what extent do fans now share authorship of the media they love?
  3. "Audiences no longer consume media; they perform themselves through it." Discuss.
  4. Whose interpretation of a media text matters most: the producer's, the audience's, or the algorithm's? Argue your position.

Technology

  1. "Every new media technology redistributes power — but never to the people it promised." Evaluate.
  2. To what extent does generative AI represent a different kind of media change, rather than simply a faster one?
  3. "The history of media is the history of gatekeepers changing costume." Discuss.
  4. Has the smartphone done more to democratise media or to commodify everyday life? Argue your position.

Genre and narrative

  1. "Genre is a business plan disguised as a creative tradition." Evaluate.
  2. To what extent has the form of digital platforms changed the kinds of stories media can tell?
  3. "Audiences are now so genre-literate that sincerity has become the most radical convention." Discuss.
  4. Why do some narratives travel across cultures while others cannot? Argue with specific cases.

Journalism and democracy

  1. "A democracy gets the journalism it pays for." Evaluate with reference to Aotearoa New Zealand.
  2. To what extent is declining trust in news media a failure of audiences, of journalism, or of the systems that fund it?
  3. "Platforms took journalism's audience, then its revenue, then its role — without ever accepting its responsibilities." Discuss.
  4. Is the public sphere being destroyed, or merely relocated? Argue your position.

Production practice

  1. "Constraint, not freedom, is the true engine of creativity in media production." Evaluate, drawing on your own production experience and professional examples.
  2. To what extent is every creative decision also a commercial one?
  3. "To understand media power, make media." Discuss with reference to your own practice.
  4. How do the affordances of a medium discipline the makers who work within it? Argue with examples from your own production and professional industry practice.

Media change

  1. "Media never dies; it is remediated." Evaluate this claim across at least two eras of media change.
  2. To what extent is the current era of media change genuinely unprecedented?
  3. "Each generation believes its media environment is uniquely transformative — and each is wrong, except possibly this one." Discuss.
  4. What has been lost in the transition from scheduled to on-demand media — and does it matter? Argue your position.

Ethics and regulation

  1. "Regulating media in the platform era is both more necessary and less possible than ever." Evaluate.
  2. To what extent should freedom of expression protect media content that causes demonstrable harm?
  3. "Age restrictions on social media protect politicians more than they protect young people." Discuss.
  4. Who should be accountable for what an algorithm amplifies: the platform, the creator, the regulator, or the user? Argue your position.

Building your own questions

Writing Scholarship-style questions is itself excellent revision. The formula most use: a provocative claim in quotation marks + an instruction to evaluate it, or "To what extent…" applied to a real tension. Take any sentence from the Concepts page's "possible arguments" lists and turn it into a question — then plan it.

Next: Example Bank →