1. If you don't really enjoy a subject, drop it early and try something else.. Or if you are finding it particularly difficult, ie not just a little challenging.. Definitely drop it or change it. I tried to carry on with maths and ended up learning the whole spec then dropping it, afterwards my other subjects improved and I felt a lot better about my AS grades, however I didn't do as well as I could've and wish I'd have swapped/dropped maths sooner.
2. Use your time wisely, my first year I spent my free blocks talking with friends, going into town etc.. I didn't really start my revision until quite late etc and because of this my grades suffered (ADD). 2nd yeah I started my revision at the start of the year, using my frees to go over everything, rewrite notes etc.. I ended up rewriting everything I learned in biology and psychology at least twice, with full books of hand written notes. I came in early and stayed late when it got to around March, and for me this made all the difference. The very end of exam time I spent entire days rewriting everything, I did every past exam I could find, made up my own essays and wrote them and got them marked etc.. I had to do 3 resits which I paid for out of my own money and if I had a better work ethic in first year I probably wouldn't have had to. This year my past papers are consistently A* and I'm looking at getting a much better set of grades, which I worked my a** off for haha.
3. If there is a teacher you think isn't up to par, don't just sit and moan about them to your friends/classmates, make a formal complaint. We had a very new inexperienced teacher for history who wouldn't take feedback on board and barely knew the spec, really damaging all our grades.. I spent quite some time just hoping things would get better but in the end I just had to do the right thing and tell the subject leader what was going on, getting others to voice their problems too. I also told my tutor what the problems were, just to try and make sure something could be done. After they'd received all the feedback, lessons were better and the teacher actually paid attention to the comments we were making.. Unfortunately this took so long, it happened once the spec had been fully learned and we were all doing independent revision. If you have a serious problem, tell someone as soon as you can!
4. Get to know the UMS system pretty well, it'll help you in the long run (At least it did for me). Every past paper you do, look up the UMS to raw marks conversion for that particular paper and see how close you were to the next grade boundary, in the end UMS are all that matters :/. Find out how many UMS each unit is worth, for me in 2nd year I could estimate how many UMS I needed in certain exams to get the grade I wanted, such as for history.. learning that with my other grades for AS and my coursework, I'd be able to get a B overall just by getting a D in the A2 exam, which definitely took some of the pressure off. I'm not sure if it's the same for the new spec but it'll at least help when you're doing past papers and want to know exactly what grade it would be.. It also shows you easily how many marks are needed for an A*, and how many marks would get you max UMS.
Enjoy your time at college/sixth form and even if you do screw up there's always something you can do to try improve your situation, be that exam resits, an EPQ, or spending a year doing work after to improve your prospects for university
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