PHYA4 June 11 2014 - Poll

Section B was fine. Section A was very difficult.

The problem was NOT ENOUGH FRICKIN' TIME. I had to guess a LOT of section A stuff.

It seems to be either one or the other - people either found A difficult and B okay or A okay and B difficult.

Personally I found A slightly harder but both pretty bad. And agree, nowhere near enough time, everyone else ran out too.

Dear AQA: my university place should not depend on what I, or other people, have to randomly circle at the end in lack of time!

You've made AQA look like fools!

Not exactly, but you understand my point, no? Like other people alluded to in the PHYA4 thread, it would make far, far more sense for them to just extend exam time and raise grade boundaries to compensate.

Not a single one of my class finished in time. Same goes for lots of people in the other thread.

i was taking the piss, but i do totally get your point. (i'm an *******).


Generally, i think the whole way of taking exams for science based subjects is bull****, i mean, we work for 2 years and there's some stupid paper that tests us on 1/5 of what we've learnt? So some gump could revise a certain topic the night before and do better than someone who has revised for 2 years?


It annoys me because i can't do anything about it.

Found A super hard, B was average but I know a couple that I got wrong. Like someone already said, there just isn't enough time! The pressure was too much.

What are the grade boundaries likely to be?

I think I probably got between 50-55 out of 75. What grade do you think that is?

Mean grade boundary for an A for every single paper that's come up so far is 51/75. I reckon this will be somewhat lower, probably 48/75 like June 2010.

They need to increase exam time to about 2 hours at least, and increase grade boundaries slightly. Like I said in another thread: in real life, in science, when are we ever going to have to figure out about 40 answers in an hour and 45 minutes, with distractor answers to confuse us? It doesn't work like that.

I really want to do something about the timing issue, like writing a letter to AQA, but I feel as though they'll just throw it in the bin because I'm a student, we're all students, and we're always gonna bitch and whine about exams or something...

It's really irritating. Like others have said, we've been learning physics at A level for 2 years now, and we get an hour and 45 minutes to basically concentrate on section B and guess on most of section A.
How is that fair? I mean, a four year old could get full marks in section A just by guessing, but an A* candidate who runs out of time could get no marks because he had to rush and just guess stuff.

They need to increase exam time to about 2 hours at least, and increase grade boundaries slightly. Like I said in another thread: in real life, in science, when are we ever going to have to figure out about 40 answers in an hour and 45 minutes, with distractor answers to confuse us? It doesn't work like that.