Take our quiz to find out what your revision personality is! >>

A Level Mathematics

Hello,I came to UK last year and due to late entry I got admission in IT A level in a college. They are not teaching mathematics there. But to do engineering in computer science/IT, I should have mathematics A Level. Please advise the options to register/complete the mathematics A level in 1 year.

Reply 1

MindMax2000

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by drishuk

You would likely have to do this privately. You can check with the local sixth form colleges whether they would allow you to do the odd A Level with them (or ask your existing college whether they collaborate with any local sixth form for the extra A Level, although this is unlikely).

If you do decide to do this privately, you would likely have to pay for the course and the exam yourself.
You would then have 2 options, either:

Pick up the textbook for the specific A Level (AQA, EdExcel, OCR) and study everything yourself

Go and do a course at either an independent college or an online college (some courses include the fees for booking exams, but some don't so you would need to check)

After completing the course, you would need to do the exam. The window for arranging your exams is between November and February; after February, you have until late April before registration closes off completely (you will also incur late fees during this period). To book your exam, you would need to:

Go to your chosen exam board's website and look for the private candidate section

In the private candidate section, you would need to find a list of exam centres approved by the exam board

Go through the list of exam centres, prioritising those closest to you and liaise with the exam officers at these centres

You would need to pay the exam fee and the admin fee for the exam; these are set by the exam board and not the exam centre.

If you do decide to pick an online college course, there are about 20 in the country that offers this. Whether the course is any good would depend on the individual tutor, not the college (you can have one tutor who is amazing for one course and another terrible in another, both in the same college). You normally get 8-20 assignments for your specific course, and the assignments would follow the syllabus of the A Level. Your course would also a specific exam board, so if you want to study under EdExcel, you don't want to pick AQA courses in A Level Maths for example.
As far as I know, most online colleges for A Level Maths follow the AQA syllabus and only a handful follow EdExcel. I have not come across one that follows OCR as an online course.
You should budget for your calculator(s) approved for the exam, as well as any revision guides and exam practice books that you want.

If you have not done A Level Maths before or don't have a particular affinity for maths, then I don't specifically recommend self studying maths as opposed to doing a course (offline preferrably, if not online). It's not an easy A Level to do and you would likely want as much support as you can in order to get a decent grade.