Budding Doctors/ Doctors in training

(Original post by FatimaHere)
What were you like at GCSE? What grades did you get, in Maths especially?
Easiest/ hardest subject?

(Original post by dropthealkali)
I'm in Year 13 and have applied to do medicine
I got 10A*s at GCSE and I found science, maths and music the easiest and German and English literature the hardest. I found English Literature very very hard and I worked my bum off for that A*, which I just scraped by one mark!

(Original post by bubblegumcat)
what kind of revision did you do for english literature? i find the subject hard as well and I'd like at least a B :/

(Original post by dropthealkali)
Well I looked at the exam: my exam board was WJEC and I knew that I was going to be asked to do an essay and one of the choices would always be either a theme or a character. So, I wrote essay plans for every potential character and theme I could think of (I got help from my teacher and classmates to think of themes because I couldn't think of many). Each plan (and therefore each essay) looked a little like this:

- Introduction (brief overview of what I was about to say)
- Scene 1
- Scene 2
- Scene 3
- Scene 4
- Scene 5
- Conclusion (brief overview of what I had just said)

I tried to use scenes that I could use for more than one character/ theme so I had less quotes to learn. Also, for both theme and character essays try to include a scene that is a bit contradictory to the general idea e.g. if a character is really really nice most of the time, include a scene where they may be shown as less nice for a bit of contrast.

As long as you can back up what you say you'll be fine and try to just put quotes in that are short and that say a lot about the character/ theme.

Obviously if you're doing a different board or your exam is different this may be a load of rubbish haha!

For me, condensing English into lists and bullet points I could learn made it seem less daunting because it was all so waffley and never ending!

Also, practice practice practice practice all the papers and potential essay questions or extract analyses you can find and make up your own questions if you run out of past questions. This helped my exam technique massively. I found the timing in my exam hard but I just made my plan that I had to spend ten mins on one bit and twenty mins on another and stuck to it.