I got close to 45 (44) and I think English is heavily memorisation based. I made universal plans on different themes that included the evidence and analysis I was going to use for each paragraph. I regurgitated them on exam day. The only things I changed were the first half of the intro, topic sentences, linking sentences and conclusion to make my template essay fit the prompt. Obviously some 45-50 peeps winged it on the day since they like to write organically and spontaneously in order to respond to the prompt more effectively, but I'm not as cracked as them and I absolutely couldn't for the life of me improvise stuff on an English exam. I have mates scoring in the high 40s who went with the same brute force memorisation approach as me though, so no particular method is one size fits all
