I would strongly recommend making a headstart on your AS/A-levels. The level of work required to get a high grade at A-level can be quite daunting, and it helped me tremendously to get my hands on the A-level textbooks well ahead of time, working through the content at my own pace. This meant that when I finally started term, the lessons felt like revision, and homework took very little effort, so I was better able to allocate my time towards my weaknesses, which altogether led to a much more pleasant experience during sixth form, with fewer time pressures than I otherwise would have had.

Reply 5

joejoeeames

OP

12

This is really solid advice. I am in the process of ordering textbooks from CGP and on Amazon to slingshot myself into my A-Levels. However they are quite expensive, but all in all, I suspect it took a substantial amount of weight off your shoulders...

Original post by spectral_theory

I would strongly recommend making a headstart on your AS/A-levels. The level of work required to get a high grade at A-level can be quite daunting, and it helped me tremendously to get my hands on the A-level textbooks well ahead of time, working through the content at my own pace. This meant that when I finally started term, the lessons felt like revision, and homework took very little effort, so I was better able to allocate my time towards my weaknesses, which altogether led to a much more pleasant experience during sixth form, with fewer time pressures than I otherwise would have had.

Reply 6

spectral_theory

13

Original post by joejoeeames

This is really solid advice. I am in the process of ordering textbooks from CGP and on Amazon to slingshot myself into my A-Levels. However they are quite expensive, but all in all, I suspect it took a substantial amount of weight off your shoulders...

It did indeed! I talked to my sixth form and they let me borrow some of the A-level textbooks for a small deposit fee (much smaller than it would have cost had I went out and bought them myself), and I downloaded scanned copies of some textbooks online, which saved me a lot of money (though there are some obvious legal complications regarding this). In particular, I had heard that A-level Chemistry was one of the hardest A-levels (particularly with the exam board our sixth form chose), so I decided to self-study the entirety of the AS before starting term, which meant I could spend more of my time studying other things. It might also be worth looking at second hand copies of textbooks online.

Reply 7

Elosant

9

Id read books but definitely not something as qualification or domain specific. Personally the main reason why I hated studying for GCSEs was the scope of content the was too restricted (not that it was "small" but far too uniform), and the material taught just simply wasn't interesting. Perhaps you could find more general books on subjects you find interesting (the feynman lectures for physics, sicp for computer science and maybe a precalculus text like the books by I.M Gelfand to name a few).

Don't bore yourself with academia though, read some good literature. The gulag archipelago and 1984 are some of my recommendations. Go cold turkey on netflix/youtube and see if you enjoy this stuff for a few days.

****ing Summer

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