resitting a-levels advice

Practice questions are ALWAYS a good idea! They're the best type of revision - and if you already know the content, they're the perfect thing to do. I would advise having a full recap using the specification nearer to exams though, as often exampro miss out large sections of topics and you don't want to miss anything. For my revision I would recap a topic using the spec (to make sure I knew exactly what I needed to know) and then did exam questions for that topic,and I got an A* in bio and an A in chem so it worked

WOW A* in Bio and A in Chem! Thanks for your advice! You have been very helpful! Also, did you still do past papers after all of exampro? If so, what month did you begin to do them, and for the full recap of content did you do that a month or two before or much closer to the exams? For Biology and Chemistry practicals what resources did you use - my teacher last year gave a compilation of biology past paper required practical questions (all boards), is this sufficient? And for chem I used chemrevise practical guide. What would you recommend?

No problem! And yep, I did - basically for biology I used exampro for pretty much all of the topics but then did all of the past papers in about the month or so before exams. Tbh I'm not sure that I ever managed a full recap, as I wasn't very organised (whoops) so I kind of just recapped topics at a time from March onwards and made sure I was covering them all right before the exams so they were fresh in my mind I used the spec throughout all my revision, but I used to go through it with a fine tooth comb about a week or two before the exam for that particular part of the spec.
I did the same thing with chemistry, except I didn't get exampro questions for that from my school so instead I used the physicsandmathstutor questions which are really good, as well as the questions at the end of each topic in the textbook

Honestly I can barely remember - I think I went through the AQA website and found the list of required practicals, then watched videos of them on youtube and made lots of notes. I also did quite a lot of practice questions for them (more so for chem than bio as I struggled more with chem!) - I'd say that that definitely sounds sufficient! Chemrevise is really good too so that's defo a good idea.

Okay! Thanks again! For each topic for exampro biology, some are like over 200 minutes - did you do it question by question (so do the question and check the ms) or do the whole thing under timed conditions and then check answers? Also, did you just do each document on exampro once?

Ooh, I never got that much access to the exampro questions - my teachers made a big booklet of them as 45ish minute "tests" (although realistically they only ever took me 20ish minutes!). So I just did each test under timed conditions and then marked the whole thing I would then do the same test a while later to consolidate what I'd learned!

Oh okay cool! Also, what did you do to prepare for the Biology essay, and did you specifically memorise any outside of the spec knowledge to add into it?

I didn't even think about the essay until year 13, when we went over how to write the essays in class (probably much later in the year than we should have done!!). I then studied the "mark scheme" (they published it and then de-published it, but everyone accepts that they still use it!) to see what I needed to be writing and how it would be marked. Biology Carol on youtube does a good video about it that you might want to look at a few days before the exam I looked up all of the previous AQA essay titles (I think they're on their website somewhere?) and brainstormed some topic areas that I'd be able to write about for each one, because I found that the hardest thing about the essay (for me personally) was working out what to write about!

I didn't learn any off-spec knowledge, as it only gives you two extra marks - you can get up to 23/25 without any extra knowledge (which is what I got in the end, by some miracle!!) so I thought that it wasn't worth spending time learning random bits of information that I might not even use.

Very helpful!!