The Student Room Group
Uni students - Complete our survey >>
Uni students - Complete our survey >>
Uni students - Complete our survey >>

What are these A levels like?

I'm considering taking Maths, Further Maths, History and French. What are these subjects like at A level, what do they involve, do you enjoy them, and how much different are they to GCSE?
Reply 1
Avatar for Banta22
Banta22
2
(These experinces are from friends not my own). I have heard maths isn't to bad from GCSE maths but further maths is extrmley difficult and requires alot of dedicated time, I have friends who dropped out because of the intensity.
Reply 2
Avatar for jtru
jtru
1
Doing Maths and Further maths so I can say a few things, most of the first year of maths will be applying some A* answers in gcse maths (only some of them)
then you learn a little in addition to that , whereas with further maths you learn a lot more content and use content from maths in general.

Having taken my AS for C1 and FP1 just recently

"I finished my C1 in 30 minutes with 1 hr extra time to recheck and I ended up finding bunches of errors I fixed so I'm confident now that I did well"
The above statement is to demonstrate what it was like with maths , because essentially the thing that was bothering me was silly errors if anything at all

"My Fp1 exam didn't go so well due to bad exam technique I did not finish"
This statement shows that despite being able to do all the questions they are questions which drive me not to finish particularly early due to the explaining and taking longer on some questions, in this case I had decided to do shorter questions first only to find that there were none on the paper over 30 minutes to go through the steps of the questions and decide, indicates that this subject does need you to be practicing more not to know content but to work without hesitation and with speed.


My Maths classes go much better and so do past papers or any questions, I'm definitely planning to take them both next year too.

Compared to GCSE I never really felt a step up but that is because at GCSE I was spending a lot more of my time playing online games and learning things that were in fact harder than what i do at A level now, so i don't even now find A levels hard (at the end of my 1st year currently) but rather see it as I need to learn this and that.

Comparing content, there is a little more in less time than your used to but non of that really takes a lot if your working on it, in support of subject choice!
I'm just at the end of Y12 doing history and French so I'll try and just give you a bit of a flavour. With history some of it obviously depends on whether you're doing early modern or late modern (I do early modern and it's fantastic:biggrin:) but generally it's really interesting if you're a natural historian. It's not a problem for me but you'll go into quite a lot of detail about what you're studying and some people in my class have struggled because they thought history was just an easy A-level that didn't require much effort when that's not the case. I'd also brush up your essay-writing skills - the biggest difference apart from content from GCSE is the fact that you're expected to write longer and more detailed essays. A good idea is to practice writing some essays over the summer or something, so that your existing essay skills don't get rusty.

With French, it's pretty much like GCSE and basically the first half of Year 12 is boring af because you'll spend it going over stuff you already knew but after that it gets really interesting because you learn a lot of new grammar structures and you also start to learn a bit about France itself - for example, we did a sort of depth study of the French education system at one point.

Hope that helped a bit:h:
Reply 4
Avatar for claire_22
claire_22
OP
12
Original post by cranbrook_aspie
I'm just at the end of Y12 doing history and French so I'll try and just give you a bit of a flavour. With history some of it obviously depends on whether you're doing early modern or late modern (I do early modern and it's fantastic:biggrin:) but generally it's really interesting if you're a natural historian. It's not a problem for me but you'll go into quite a lot of detail about what you're studying and some people in my class have struggled because they thought history was just an easy A-level that didn't require much effort when that's not the case. I'd also brush up your essay-writing skills - the biggest difference apart from content from GCSE is the fact that you're expected to write longer and more detailed essays. A good idea is to practice writing some essays over the summer or something, so that your existing essay skills don't get rusty.

With French, it's pretty much like GCSE and basically the first half of Year 12 is boring af because you'll spend it going over stuff you already knew but after that it gets really interesting because you learn a lot of new grammar structures and you also start to learn a bit about France itself - for example, we did a sort of depth study of the French education system at one point.

Hope that helped a bit:h:


Thank you! I think we're doing early modern, I know we do the French revolution. I really enjoy French GCSE and you've made me definitely want to take A level. I'm worried about getting a good grade in it? I've heard its really difficult to get a good grade in, and a lot of people who take it are like half French which makes the grade boundaries high?

Quick Reply

Related discussions

Latest

Trending

Trending

Articles for you