This page lists what we actually have for OCR GCSE Religious Studies J625. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Built to the mark split
Religious Studies has a reputation among students for being a subject you either write well in or do not, which quietly hides the fact that half the marks are for knowing things: named teachings, sources of wisdom, the details of a practice, the words of a creed.
OCR splits its assessment between that knowledge and the evaluation built on it. These activities are put together the same way.
Eighteen of the nineteen contain a timed recall round with a life count, where a wrong answer costs something and the pace is deliberately faster than a student would choose. That is the AO1 half: can you produce the Five Pillars, the Nicene formula, the stages of hajj, without stopping to think.
All nineteen end with a written evaluative answer of a hundred and fifty words, with the moves of the argument given as an explicit frame rather than buried in a list of content. That is the AO2 half.
The pairing is the point. A student who can only do the second half writes fluent paragraphs with nothing in them, which is the commonest way to lose marks in this subject, and a student who can only do the first half produces a list.
Christianity and Islam
OCR asks for two religions in Component Group 1, beliefs and teachings and practices for each. We built Christianity and Islam.
Christianity: the nature of God and the Trinity, the incarnation and resurrection, salvation and eschatology, worship and sacraments, prayer, pilgrimage and celebrations, the local church and rites of passage, and mission and the wider church.
Islam: the nature of Allah, prophethood and holy books, angels and predestination, akhirah and life after death, worship and hajj, zakat, khums and sawm, and festivals and jihad.
If your department teaches Christianity with Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism, the Christianity half is yours and the Islam half is not. There is no partial version of the other four here.
The theme that is missing
Component Group 2 is religion, philosophy and ethics from a Christian perspective, across four themes. Three have activities here: the existence of God, religion peace and conflict, and dialogue between religious and non-religious beliefs and attitudes.
Relationships and families has none.
That is a gap rather than a decision, and an awkward one, because it is the theme most departments teach first and the one where students most often have opinions before they have arguments. Nothing on this page helps with it.
The strongest activities
The existence of God is the best served: arguments for the existence of God, experiencing God, and creation and the problem of evil form a run that works in order, and the problem of evil activity is the one to set if a class needs to learn what an evaluative answer looks like when both sides are genuinely strong.
Religious, non-religious dialogue is the newest part of the specification and the part departments find hardest to resource, and it has an activity of its own.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
The other board's specifications are covered at Edexcel GCSE Religious Studies A and Edexcel GCSE Religious Studies B, which are shaped very differently from this one.
What this page does not do
Nothing on relationships and families. Named above rather than left to be discovered.
Nothing on four of OCR's six religions.
It does not mark the written answers. The structure is there to be followed and a human still reads what comes out.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.