Worried about improving grades - success stories?

I'm looking for a bit of motivation really - I got BBCC in my AS levels and I'm aiming for BBB (bio, chem, french) at A2 in order to meet my offer to study Children's Nursing next September. In particular, the subject I'm most worried about is Chemistry. I got a C at AS Level and I'm hoping to bring my grade up to a B - I'm also resitting Unit 2 AS. However my Chemistry teacher today told our class that bringing up our grades is an unrealistic prospect and we should be expecting a grade below our AS result which would mean I'm on track for a D. Naturally this has massively knocked my confidence because I've been working really hard to try and improve this year and I thought I was on track to get this B. Has anybody (in any subject, but especially chemistry) managed to bring their A Level grades up one or two grades despite less than brilliant AS results? I'd appreciate your stories and advice

I got a B in AS Chemistry with a C in the F322 (OCR A unit 2) exam. Resat it, got 100% in my retake and an overall A*. Chemistry can be improved very easily - there's so much overlap with AS and A2.

Hey! First of all, please don't take what your teacher says as set in stone - BBB is definitely a realistic prospect for you considering you got BBCC at AS, and especially if you're working really hard like you've said (Also, some teachers are just scaremongering and are quite often wrong, I've found :P)

I did all humanities so I can't offer any specific knowledge on how easy it is to pull up science grades, but I got AACD at AS and managed A*A*A* without retakes at A2, so anything is genuinely possible. If you do a ton of past papers for Chemistry and you're studying productively throughout this year, you can pretty much achieve anything, and I think you're likely to find the AS retake you're doing easier considering you're learning at a higher level now anyway, if that makes sense I really hope you get your grades!

Wow, this is hugely reassuring! I am also on the OCR A board - I'm going back over resit stuff already thinking that F322 is so much easier now we've done F324 because the amount of overlap. Have you got any tips for revision?

How did you get to an A* without a retake? I had a D for biology and I need more than 300 points just to get an A. Also, can you give me any advice regarding which subject that I should retake? I had a C for Chemistry and D for Biology in AS, and I had an E for unit 2 chemistry and U for Biology. I'm asking for help because I feel like chemistry is much harder this year than biology but I'm not sure. Thank you in advance

The C was in History, so I basically worked my absolute butt off for the A2 units and got 100% for the exam and around 95% for the coursework. Because of the way getting an A* works, if you average 90% across your A2 units and have an average of at least 80% across AS + A2, I got an A*. To be honest, it was still totally unexpected because I thought I'd failed the exam!

I think if you can bring yourself to, retake the Chem exam you got an E in and the exam you got a U in for Bio. I had a couple of friends who did similar things, and the general consensus from them was that the AS retakes were so much easier because the knowledge required for them overlapped with the (more difficult) stuff they learnt at A2. Hope I managed to help at least a little, and good luck!