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A Level Choices

I’m definitely taking English lit A Level, but currently deliberating between biology, psychology and Spanish. I only want to take three- any advice?
Reply 1
You could always try 4 for a term and then drop the one you enjoy least around Christmas? That’s what I did at the start of sixth form and it made it easy to see which subjects I didn’t want to continue with and which ones I loved. If you see which one you really don’t like after a couple of weeks you can drop to three then as well/if the work load gets too much.
Alternatively, you could switch from one subject to another but this obviously means you have to catch up on work missed and there’s no guarantee you’ll like the new subject so I personally think doing four for a couple of weeks is best.
Original post by magnificat.11
I’m definitely taking English lit A Level, but currently deliberating between biology, psychology and Spanish. I only want to take three- any advice?


As someone who did Spanish in high school as well as at university, I'd definitely recommend taking it. It's a really fun subject and even if you don't pursue a degree in Spanish, you'll have achieved a really good level of it through A level. Even if you forget it, it'll be extremely easy to pick it up again. It'll also be really easy to pick up similar languages (Portuguese, French and Italian etc) and the process of learning a foreign language will definitely help you in the future if you ever wanted to pick up an unrelated language like Russian, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese or Korean etc.

The A level course is pretty interesting and relevant as well. Quite a lot of culture and literature/movie - a little bit for everyone. I also think that Bio and Psych are somewhat similar so it might be nice to have variety in the form of English Lit, Spanish + Bio/Psych.

As for the second, I'm not sure as I've studied Human Biology but not Psychology or (regular) Biology. I actually think that Biology may cover some topics of Psychology but that could depend on the exam board. I don't know about Psychology but Biology is seriously heavy with the amount of information you have to learn. Psychology might be similar. Perhaps go with the one that you think might be more interesting or relevant to you?

What are you considering doing after your A levels?
(edited 4 years ago)
As an aside, I'm glad you said that you only want to do 3 A level subjects. Just so you know, there is absolutely no point whatsoever in doing more than 3 subjects. Universities won't find it impressive and they'll just ignore the extra subject and ask for 3 grades. I'd seriously consider doing the subjects that you'd enjoy the most / the ones that will get you your best grades.

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