These are my revision notes from the BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, shared for future cohorts. I relied heavily on Ren’s PPE notes during my own economics revision, and this is my way of passing that help on. I now research environmental questions in International Relations. You can find more about my work at heatherhzli.com.
I graduated with First-Class Honours in 2025, with a first-class mark in every paper and the Gibbs Prize for the highest overall performance in Politics. I ranked first in International Security and Conflict (77), got the top Politics thesis mark (79), and got the top mark among PPE students for the Environmental Economics MATLAB project (74). My International Relations (78) and International Security notes are likely to be the most useful (although they are incomplete since not all my notes were in any shape to be shared), since those are the papers I did best in and the area I went on to study at graduate level. I’ve included some others in case they help.
These notes almost certainly contain some mistakes. They reflect my own understanding as a student, so if your tutor tells you something different, go with your tutor. If you spot a significant error, please email me at [email protected].
I took a high-risk, high-reward approach. It worked for me, but I can’t promise it will work for you. Instead of revising five or six topics per paper, I revised four in great depth, doing every reading and more. I then prepared one extra topic as a back-up, doing only the essential readings. This meant I could answer almost any question on my main topics, with plenty of references and links to the wider literature. The downside was that when a question on one of my topics was a bad one, I was stuck answering it and didn’t have a better back-up. Use this approach with caution.