The Student Room Group

Latin or Art GCSE?

Hi, I'm in year 9 now and we have to choose our GCSEs.
So far I have chosen,
-English language
-English literature
-Maths
-Chemistry
-Biology
-Physics
-History
-French
-Spanish
But I still don't know whether to do latin or art as a subject? If anyone has any opinions that would be great, thank you so much!
…(I go to a private school if that makes it any different)
Reply 1
I didn't do art for GCSE, but everyone who did do art was always very stressed out. I don't think anyone in my school is taking it for A level as a result.

On the other hand, I DID take Latin for GCSE and it's one of my favourite subjects. The course was really fun and easy and we finished the syllabus really early so we had plenty of time to revise in class. ( We did the OCR exam board btw.)

If you are passionate about art and are willing to put a lot of time into your coursework, then maybe that is for you. I would advise you to take Latin though (it also really helps with English lit.)

Hope this helps :smile:
Reply 2
Latin will tie in with English and the other languages really well.
Do Latin. I did Art GCSE and I had to sacrifice all my other subjects to manage to finish my coursework and exam work. Art is not a good subject to do if you want straight As/A*s
Latin definitely, as it will help you do better in your English and MFLs
Reply 5
Latin definitely
Reply 6
You should definitely choose Latin :smile:
Latin literature is hell. You will have to memorize pages upon pages word for word. We started the course late at end of 10 year and it was an absolute struggle.
Reply 8
Original post by olive191
Hi, I'm in year 9 now and we have to choose our GCSEs.
So far I have chosen,
-English language
-English literature
-Maths
-Chemistry
-Biology
-Physics
-History
-French
-Spanish
But I still don't know whether to do latin or art as a subject? If anyone has any opinions that would be great, thank you so much!
…(I go to a private school if that makes it any different)


Only do Art if you genuinely like it. Each school run their Art courses differently, and some would even force you to write short essays for artist research and such, which in my opinion is very very pointless. (+_+)

I regretted doing both GCSE and A-level Art, although it had some fun moments.
Latin was a great GCSE. I didn't envy the Art students. Lol
I did both latin and art.
I'd say art.
Reply 11
Thank you so much, I think I will take Latin because I'm more confident in it, and receive better results in it as well. However I'm worried about the literature side to Latin as I'm not very strong at English analysis? What would you say? x
Latin is pretty good - it helps with english

the set text is quite a lot to learn though and it's nothing like english analysis (in my opinion), but from experience, it's helped me with poetry analysis for some reason...
Original post by olive191
Thank you so much, I think I will take Latin because I'm more confident in it, and receive better results in it as well. However I'm worried about the literature side to Latin as I'm not very strong at English analysis? What would you say? x


I'm a little biased (I do A Level Latin and the amount of literature you have to do almost doubles), but honestly the GCSE literature isn't that bad. If you learn the vocab for your set text (literally word for word, e.g. learning retardarunt as they hinder) and make sure you're familiar with the text, you should be fine. You'll get plenty of practice in class, and once you're done a few papers you'll realise that it's very formulaic at GCSE - alliteration, tricolons, asyndetons, etc. Once you know what these things are and know how to pick them out, literature becomes very easy!

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