Awful GCSE's, Amazing A-levels

Yh but you're not exactly the average candidate. I don't know many people who do 5 AS' without being damn clever (and getting A's in all of them). Usual people just do 3/4 as' D:

I wouldn't say i was clever, I think it's more about being hardworking. I mean my GCSE's were 3A's 4B's 3C's and a D, which, in my school classed me as not being so clever.
One of my cousins has 4 degrees (2 undergrad and two postgrad, unusual I know), he said something that stuck with me when I started my AS, which was, "The hardest working person beats the most intelligent person 9 times out of 10 at University".
I've found that to be unbelievably true, alot of my friends on my course were far superior to me in intellect, in the sense that they could understand course content much quicker. But I worked harder, more consistently throughout the year and eventually got much higher grades than them. Even at A levels, I probably worked harder than most people at my school, throughout free periods, lunchtimes, most of the time after school as well.

I think the main thing to take away is that if you are determined enough, you will eventually succeed. But you have to have that drive, I had tuition throughout GCSE and look at my grades. I had no form of tuition throughout AS or A Level, just the drive to do better (I was predicted BCCDD for AS).

Respect for working hard. I'm kinda surprised your school let you do 5 AS exams actually since you didn't do like all a's/a*s at gcses. The most our school let us was 4 AS' or 5 if you had a language one. Then again I don't mind as it does get to be a lot of work.
There are a lot of resources out there to do well, people just aren't using them