I just realized I'm doing IGCSE science!

Hi all,
Sorry for this inconvenience, and apologies to all those who I troubled in my previous post about the triple award science in GCSE.

I have now realised that I will be taking the IGCSE separate sciences. I was previously very confused because everything people were saying about GCSE science seemed rather confusing :s-smilie:

I have now found some past papers and specifications from the edexcel website. If anyone has any others to provide then I would be very grateful.

Does anyone know if the IGCSE sciences are harder than the GCSE ones, because I remember that last year, people who were predicted much higher in their GCSEs who changed to IGCSE got much lower results than expected. Do you also know what percentages tend to get each grade, because I was looking at the results for GCSE and there seemed to be quite a high percentage getting A*, which was quite reassuring, but I don't know about IGCSE...

By the way, I will be doing the edexcel IGCSE for sciences.

Reply 1

Powersymphonia

The difficulty of the papers are around the same. The main reason more higher achieving students tend to take this course is not so much because the course is harder to pass. but rather that it is more time consuming as there are more modules. At the end of the day you're going to get an extra GCSE and if you're not very good at one science but good at the others., then doing separate sciences is going to pull your grades up.

Reply 2

CocoPop

Ah, ok. Thanks for the info.

Also, I heard that apparently if you are not doing coursework, then you don't have to do all the paper 3s (the written alternative to coursework) for each science, but rather you choose one of the papers to do from one of the sciences (whichever one you prefer) and that grade will account for all the sciences...

Is this true?

Reply 3

visesh

IGCSEs do have more on their syllabus, and are more closely related to the GCE O Levels issued by the CIE. They are not a lot more difficult, but certainly do cover a lot more ground than the GCSEs.

Reply 4

visesh

I thought the written alternative to coursework in sciences was paper 6?

Any way, if your school does not offer coursework or practical papers, you'll need to sit the alternatives for each of the three sciences. That's how I did it back in the day, but this was back in 2002, so think might've changed since.