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GCSE Options!!???!!!?

I have to give in my GCSE options in a week and I'm slightly confused. I don't know whether to pick German, IT and Geography or French, IT and Geography so basically I'm stuck on whether to pick German or French.

I get really good levels in French and I'm confident in French but I have been doing it for 3 years. Whereas German, I've only been doing for 2 years and I'm at the same level in french as I am in German.

I don't know which to choose because apparently, German is easier than French and it is the most widely spoken language in the EU. But I have been doing French for 3 years and I don't want to waste it (same with German)...!
I need help!!!!
Hi Gaby,

I did GCSE German, Geography and ICT as my options. I would personally suggest German, as I found it much easier than French, getting an A in it overall. Also, a lot of my friends did French, and they got much lower grades than myself and my other friends who did German. The number of students who choose German also tends to be lower than French, so it's likely that you'll get more individual support from the teacher.

Obviously though, no one here can tell you which would be better to pick, as you're the one who'll be studying it! Which do you find easier/enjoy more? :smile:
Original post by Leviathan1741
Hi Gaby,

I did GCSE German, Geography and ICT as my options. I would personally suggest German, as I found it much easier than French, getting an A in it overall. Also, a lot of my friends did French, and they got much lower grades than myself and my other friends who did German. The number of students who choose German also tends to be lower than French, so it's likely that you'll get more individual support from the teacher.

Obviously though, no one here can tell you which would be better to pick, as you're the one who'll be studying it! Which do you find easier/enjoy more? :smile:


Hi, thank you so much for your advice. I was actually leaning more towards German so your advice helped a lot! I find both German and French at the same level and I do enjoy both of them. What I think I might do is - I might choose German and then I want to try and do French outside of school but it depends if I have the time so...How was your Geography and ICT GCSE??
Hi! I do French and Spanish, so the Spanish part is irrelevant, but most of the people in my year agree that German is easier due to how many cognates there are :smile: Obviously though, choose whichever you enjoy more since you will do better in something you love :h:
Original post by surina16
Hi! I do French and Spanish, so the Spanish part is irrelevant, but most of the people in my year agree that German is easier due to how many cognates there are :smile: Obviously though, choose whichever you enjoy more since you will do better in something you love :h:


Hi, thanks for the advice - the problem I had was that I like both German and French and I was good in both subjects so.... But I do think I'm going to do German. How is your French??:h:
Original post by Gaby_j
Hi, thanks for the advice - the problem I had was that I like both German and French and I was good in both subjects so.... But I do think I'm going to do German. How is your French??:h:


Can you not pick both German and French? It seems as though you don't want to discontinue either :biggrin:
My French is going alright, thanks for asking :smile: Although my exam is tomorrow!!
Original post by Gaby_j
Hi, thank you so much for your advice. I was actually leaning more towards German so your advice helped a lot! I find both German and French at the same level and I do enjoy both of them. What I think I might do is - I might choose German and then I want to try and do French outside of school but it depends if I have the time so...How was your Geography and ICT GCSE??


That sounds like a good plan :h:

I found ICT to be fairly straightforward, the only tricky part was the coursework which took up quite a bit of time outside lessons (but not so much that it hindered work and revision for my other subjects). With good support from my teacher though, it wasn't too difficult! I got an A in ICT overall.

Geography was a bit harder, due to the amount of content to learn (there are a lot of case studies to learn in addition to the core geographical theory). I got a B in Geography overall, but I think that was mostly because I got a bit muddled and forgot to revise one of the topics that I needed, so I messed up one of the exams :redface:
Original post by surina16
Can you not pick both German and French? It seems as though you don't want to discontinue either :biggrin:
My French is going alright, thanks for asking :smile: Although my exam is tomorrow!!


First of all, GOOD LUCK!!! for your exams tomorrow:biggrin:. And, second, because we have the new GCSE's; our school is really stupid and is only giving us 3 options whereas, you used to have 4 options. It's because of how the new GCSE's are getting harder ad they want to allocate more time for Maths and English, which I get but it is quite unfair as we only get 10 GCSE's in the end. I've asked if I can do an extra subject but they said no...:ashamed2:
How were your other exams?
[QUOTE=Gaby_j;64370215]First of all, GOOD LUCK!!! for your exams tomorrow:biggrin:. And, second, because we have the new GCSE's; our school is really stupid and is only giving us 3 options whereas, you used to have 4 options. It's because of how the new GCSE's are getting harder ad they want to allocate more time for Maths and English, which I get but it is quite unfair as we only get 10 GCSE's in the end. I've asked if I can do an extra subject but they said no...:ashamed2:
How were your other exams?

I think he meant couldn't you pick Greman, French and then choose between Geography and IT. :smile: we had 5 options and I ran out of things I wanted to take! We also end up with a ridiculous number of GCSEs because we also have tonnes of compulsory subjects. Qualuty rather than quantity!
Original post by Lemur14
I think he meant couldn't you pick Greman, French and then choose between Geography and IT. :smile: we had 5 options and I ran out of things I wanted to take! We also end up with a ridiculous number of GCSEs because we also have tonnes of compulsory subjects. Qualuty rather than quantity!


No, so we have
- A Humanities Subject
- A Language
- And then an optional so there's stuff like - Computer Science, IT, 2nd Language, 2nd Humanity, Childcare.... stuff like that
What did you pick for GCSE's and how difficult did you find them?
Original post by Gaby_j
No, so we have
- A Humanities Subject
- A Language
- And then an optional so there's stuff like - Computer Science, IT, 2nd Language, 2nd Humanity, Childcare.... stuff like that
What did you pick for GCSE's and how difficult did you find them?


I took:
French (took last year)- as we did it in one year it was quite difficult but I don't think French as a whole is difficult, it was just the doing it in one year (and having 1 week to memorize the 18 paragraphs for our controlled assessment each time)
Computing (or computer science). Loving it! The controlled assessment involves quite a lot of hard work coding and evidencing and I haven't done great amounts of the theory so that may be more difficult but as long as I follow the instructions, mark scheme and go into enough detail I should get a good grade on the controlled assessment and then there's only the theory to worry about. Computing is much more dependent on the exam board than most subjects though. OCR is most common but probably the most difficult and the controlled assessment is much harder, AQA the controlled assessment is relatively simple and easy if you are diligent and I know nothing about Edexcel
Electronic products I love the practical aspect though I suspect the coursework will be quite difficult to get completed in the time allowance. The circuits and breadboarding is good and some of the theory overlaps with physics which is good. The theory is often quite complicated though and there aren't many revision tools out there as the subject is quite rarely taken.
History I love learning about it but the 10 markers are quite difficult. There's 16 markers in the other unit which I'm dreading. If you have the knowledge then it's quite simple to get full marks in the exam questions though.
Business Studies Not greatly exciting but very simple so far (90% + in all tests with very little revision)

We also have a lot of core subjects which are often options in other schools so I'll list them here as well
RS personally, I hate it. I have a fair number of religious quotes but I find it difficult to get full marks whatever I write. The religious teachings are difficult to learn, particularly matching the teaching with the religion though we haven't had great teachings (in fact, the department in general isn't great) so I may be doing it a disservice
ECDL An easy IT based course which has involved no revision and an average of 97% in exams so far. Not terribly keen on it as it isn't very exciting but I quite enjoy a lesson a week not doing anything particularly difficult.
Citizenship(did last year). We did the shortcourse and I found the coursework quite difficult because it involved trying to get people from politics and the like to respond to questions, often on quite a short time scale which frequently was not really possible (think frantic emails the night before having been sending reminders for a few months, just trying to get some sort of response). The exam was relatively simple, I got an A* with only one past paper and reading through the key terms the day before although we did it the week after the election and there were lot of politics questions so I could answer them with lots of up to date detail which helped.

HTH :smile:

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