Hello! In honour of my overuse of ren’s ppe notes during my economics revision, I have decided to publish my notes online for future cohorts. I’m currently in the process of editing them, making them slightly more coherent, and will add more as time goes on. Hopefully these can be of use to you.
I graduated with First-Class Honours in 2025 and ranked 9th in my cohort, with a first-class mark in every subject and the Gibbs Prize for top performance in politics. I ranked first in International Security & Conflict (77) and got the top politics thesis mark (79). I also got the top mark for the Environmental Economics MATLAB project among PPE students (74).
Accordingly, my ISC notes will probably be the most useful, along with my IR ones (where I got a 78, and am pursuing further study). However, I’ve included all of them in the hopes that they can still be of use.
In terms of general exam strategy, I decided to do a high-risk, high-reward strategy, which paid off for me but I can’t guarantee will work for you. Instead of studying 5-6 topics for each paper, I studied 4 topics incredibly in depth, doing every single reading and beyond for those four. I then studied an additional topic as a failsafe, but only did the bare minimum readings. This meant I could answer virtually any question that came up for the topics I studied with lots of references and connections to the broader literature, but it also meant I was stuck answering bad questions since I had very little knowledge on other topics. Use this strategy with caution.
Finally, mandatory caveat: these notes may (and probably do) have mistakes. I am not an expert in any of these subjects, so if your tutor says something different to what I’ve written here, listen to your tutor. If you find anything egregiously wrong, please email me at [email protected].
(Also, in case you’re curious, I made a subject access request to see the specific breakdown of my marks and how wildly the examiners may have disagreed with each other. See below.)