AQA Physics PHYA5 - Thursday 18th June 2015 [Exam Discussion Thread]

Ah mine was freezing the first night so I got the porters to check it out haha!

Ah well best of luck there! Sounds like you'd have no issue settling in.


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Yeah there is! Sucks


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I think I just needed more blankets (I pretty much nest at home in bed), but suitcase size limitations!
Thanks, hopefully not!
My friend is trying to do her gas laws hw but it's so repetitive and their class was given a booklet of past paper questions just on that... We covered most of gas laws on our gcse syllabus as well so it's just getting ridiculously boring now :/ easy marks on the exam though hopefully! Anyway she's written about 1 line since I arrived so I am clearly helpful to revision

What resources are you using given that it isn't covered in the main textbook?

CGP. You?


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CGP. You?


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Haha yeah the bag I took was bulging :L
Oh no!
A hahahah you clearly are a help!


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Is that the student book? I'm using the thin cgp, the support material book and online ppts.

The CGP book is EXCELLENT, in my opinion.

We have a little tiny suitcase and I just managed to shove everything in there and a bag for the train!
Yeah, we had a very productive morning (still actually more useful than double physics this afternoon, teacher literally talked at us about nuclear waste for almost the whole thing).

Ahahaha. That sounds accurate!

Sounds productive! How long is double physics?! :O


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Two hours :| unfortunately, my physics teacher this year is awful. It's his first year teaching A level as opposed to secondary school, and it shows a lot... and this being our A2 year we're not used to being treated like year nines anymore (although I'm pretty sure year nines as a whole never behave this well). He also barely ever collects what homework he sets, doesn't return it if he does take it in, and never returns our tests (still waiting on a mock from a month ago). When we're marking work he reads out the markscheme instead of letting us see it - which doesn't sound so awful, until you're trying to remember all the points he reeled off for a six mark question and decipher someone elses handwriting (our table has horrible handwriting, me included!) and he's already moving on to the next question. Also means you can't see if you should have method marks because he only reads out the answer to calculations. And because these tests also never get returned once he takes them in, we'll never know! He's also offered me absolutely no help about all the lessons I've missed for uni things, even though I went and talked to him about it beforehand.

That all sounds so awful! Well tell you what, make sure to post any questions you're not sure of on here as well next time! Might help you get an answer from all of us quicker than from him! Aha!


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The only problem is we don't have access to the questions either half the time because he takes the tests off of us! But I certainly will if no one can figure them out :/

That sounds terrible. Does he not let you know which exam series they're from?


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they're usually topic tests put together from past paper questions or whatever else the teachers have access too, so we can't tell which years markscheme we need for each question and because he takes them off us we can't see the questions when we're done :/ although he did say he'd return our unit 4 mock today!
Off to physics now :/

Oh no :/ how did it go?

He still hasn't returned them. We did the mock about a month ago now :|

That's awful :/ I feel so bad for you. It sounds like you're coping okay without him though! Do you have a personal tutor you could talk to?


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I mean last year our teacher wasn't great either (our entire physics department - well, all four of them - are either some form of incompetent or exceptionally boring), but it was mostly the maths that he didn't teach which didn't affect me much, and he used to let us spend whole lessons marking things and doing past papers which was actually very useful. I think the current one is more of a problem to people working hard to get Cs and stuff, rather than people who find physics easier anyway because we can just pick things up between us from what we do have and it won't go too badly in the end. It does make lessons fairly unappealing though! Unless we do some useful or fun revision type things when course content is finished I sense a lot of skiving in my future :P On the bright side, we have a nuclear physics topic test on Monday and then we only have astrophysics to do!

I do have a tutor... She's possibly even worse at her job than my physics teacher, which is impressive considering her job is literally just to look after us (at our sixth form, tutors are just tutors, they don't teach a subject as well) and I would rather talk to any of my other teachers about emotional/personal/college related things than her (this is a view held by 99.9% of her students). Last year we had tutorial every week - for people with good tutors, this only took about 10-20 minutes because it was just a few notices unless there was important things to do. Ours only took less than an hour twice in the whole year :| Fortunately this year they're trialling a new system where tutorial is only on once every 3 weeks or so, and the last time it was on I was ill so I've only seen her once since my UCAS application was finished! (I had to see her four times to get it fixed properly. Partly because my personal statement needed a lot of work, but she dragged it out by not telling me all the problems at once?). We also have one on one appointments every half term which are 100% pointless unless you actually have a problem, but as I was ill when the last ones were sorted and she hasn't contacted me to set one up, I've had a narrow escape!

Okay this makes my college sound really bad (...sorry for ranting at you a bit!) so I should probably finish by pointing out that all my other teachers I have/have had there are lovely and equal favourite teachers ever and very very good :P