AQA examiner reports for A-Level Law Paper 1 flag the same fault, year after year: strong, accurate statements of the law followed by a conclusion that never actually applies that law to the named defendant. A student can define duress correctly, cite the right case, and still score in the middle bands — because stating a rule and applying it to a scenario are two different skills, and only one of them is being tested by most of the marks on the page.
IRAC — Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion — is the structure AQA examiners are trained to look for in a scenario answer. It sounds almost too simple to be worth teaching. In practice, almost every mark lost on Paper 1 comes from skipping or rushing one of these four stages, usually Application. Here's what each stage actually has to do, and a full worked example so you can see it done properly.
The four stages, and what each one is actually for
Issue. State the precise legal question the scenario raises — not "has a crime been committed" but "has [Defendant] committed murder, and if not, does the partial defence of loss of control reduce liability to voluntary manslaughter?" A vague issue statement signals a vague answer before you've written a single rule.
Rule. State the legal rule with its source: the common law definition, the relevant statutory section, and the case authority that established or clarified the test. A rule with no authority attached is an assertion, not law — and AQA credits legal argument that names its authority higher than the same argument without one.
Application. Apply the rule to the named facts, sentence by sentence, matching each element of the legal test to a specific fact from the scenario. This is where the majority of the marks actually sit. AQA examiner reports repeatedly note that candidates who can state the law accurately still lose marks here, by failing to connect it back to the facts they were given.
Conclusion. State a reasoned conclusion on liability that follows logically from the application — not a repeated restatement of the rule. Where the facts are genuinely balanced, state which way the stronger argument points and why, rather than refusing to commit either way.
The test: read back your own Application paragraph and count how many times you use the defendant's actual name versus the word "the defendant" in the abstract. If your Application paragraph would still make sense with the names removed, it isn't application yet — it's a second Rule paragraph wearing a disguise.
The worked example: duress by threats
Here's a full IRAC model answer to a Paper 1-style scenario question.
The scenario: Farah, threatened with a knife by Kai and told she will be stabbed unless she helps him break into a house, drives Kai to the property. Discuss any defence(s) available to Farah.
The issue is whether Farah can rely on the necessity-based defence of duress by threats to any offence arising from driving Kai to the property, given the threat of being stabbed if she refused. Duress requires, per R v Hasan, a threat of death or serious injury, made to the defendant or someone for whom the defendant reasonably regards themselves as responsible, which the defendant reasonably believed existed and which caused the defendant to act as they did.
Applying the rule to the facts, the threat here — being stabbed with a knife unless Farah complies — clearly meets the "death or serious injury" threshold required by Hasan. The two-stage Graham test then asks, first, whether Farah was, or may have been, impelled to act as she did because she reasonably believed she had good cause to fear death or serious injury (a subjective question), and second, whether a sober person of reasonable firmness, sharing Farah's characteristics, would have responded in the same way (an objective standard) — on facts describing an immediate knife threat, both limbs are likely satisfied.
A necessary further step, easily missed, is R v Hasan's restriction on defendants who voluntarily associate with criminals they know or ought to know might subject them to compulsion: if the facts showed Farah had prior knowledge of Kai's propensity for violence or had voluntarily joined a criminal enterprise with him, duress could be excluded on that basis. On the facts as given — an apparently spontaneous threat with no indication of a prior criminal association — this restriction should not defeat the defence, but a top-band answer states the rule and confirms it does not apply, rather than ignoring it.
The defence is not available for murder or attempted murder (R v Howe), so its availability here depends on what offence Farah is actually charged with; for an offence such as aggravated burglary or theft arising from driving Kai to the property, duress by threats remains available in principle and, on the facts given, is likely to succeed, because the threat was of death/serious injury, immediate, and not the product of voluntary association with known criminal violence. The conclusion should therefore be stated as conditional on the specific offence charged, not as a single blanket outcome.
Why this scores — and what most answers miss
Notice what the Rule stage does in the very first sentence: it names the defence and its foundational authority together, before a single fact has been applied. That's not decoration — it signals to the examiner that the full legal picture has been identified before the analysis starts.
The Application stage does something a lot of students skip: it works through both limbs of the Graham test against the specific facts, rather than reciting the test and moving straight to a conclusion. Then it does something even fewer students think to do — it proactively raises the Hasan voluntary-association restriction and rules it out, rather than only checking whether the defence is available. AQA mark schemes consistently reward candidates who check a defence against its own exclusions and limits, not just its headline test. Self-defence has the same shape: it isn't enough to show the belief in a threat was genuine, because R v Martin (Anthony) shows that force disproportionate to that perceived threat still fails, however honest the initial belief.
The conclusion is the part most students get wrong by trying too hard to sound decisive. It doesn't give a single flat answer — it flags the Howe murder exclusion and makes the outcome explicitly conditional on which offence Farah is actually charged with. AQA mark schemes credit a reasoned conditional conclusion over an unjustified definite one. Treating "the defence applies" as the end of the analysis, without checking what it doesn't cover, is exactly the gap examiner reports single out.
The check to run before you submit
Go back through your own answer and find every sentence in your Rule paragraph. For each one, ask: is there a sentence anywhere in my Application that uses this specific rule against a specific fact from the scenario? If a rule you've stated never gets used again, delete it or apply it — a rule sitting unused in an IRAC answer earns none of the marks that application carries, no matter how accurately it's stated.
This same structure holds regardless of which part of AQA's criminal law content the scenario draws on — murder and voluntary manslaughter, the non-fatal offences ladder from common assault up to s18, or a capacity or necessity defence. The law changes topic to topic; the requirement to run every element of it against a named fact does not.
If you want this same method applied across the rest of AQA's Paper 1 criminal law content — a second full IRAC model on murder and loss of control (including the sexual-infidelity exclusion under s55(6)(c)), a timed plan working up the full s47/s20/s18 ladder, and a case-law bank of 18 named authorities with a one-line ratio for each, ready to cite — the full pack works through it structure by structure. You can find it in the shop.