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What alevel should I pick?

I have decided on psychology and sociology but I don’t know whether to do English lit or biology as well. I have no idea what I wanna do in uni btw.

Reply 1

Shelly Wang

Original post by volatile-lake

I have decided on psychology and sociology but I don’t know whether to do English lit or biology as well. I have no idea what I wanna do in uni btw.

Do you have a strong passion in biology? If you don't I don't recommend taking biology a level.

(edited 8 months ago)

Reply 2

MindMax2000

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by volatile-lake

I have decided on psychology and sociology but I don’t know whether to do English lit or biology as well. I have no idea what I wanna do in uni btw.

I would go for biology. Personally, I would err on doing sociology, but if you love the subject then good for you.

Biology because:

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It's a required subject for many of the life science degrees

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Should you ever want to go into a psychology degree, some can be picky about whether you have biology/psychology or not

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It complements psychology pretty well (well cognitive psychology and neuroscience topics)

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It's going to be really expensive to sit a science A Level outside of college

The only time when I would consider English Lit over Biology is if you are passionate about English Lit and you really want to do it at a top end university (other universities don't really require English subjects).

Reply 3

Shelly Wang

Original post by Shelly Wang

Do you have a strong passion in biology? If you don't I don't recommend taking biology a level.

I took A level Biology. I had to remember lots of information and lots of practicals.
I usually don’t have a problem remembering information but since I didn’t like biology that much, it was a pain having to remember loads of information. But maybe that’s different for you.

Another thing is that my exam board was really annoying. My exam board was Edexcel. My biology teacher told me that you could remember the entire textbook and not get good grades. This is because the markscheme is so strict in terms of your answers. They would be looking for one specific word in your answer in order to give you the mark. If you wrote lots and it answers the question but didn’t include that one specific word, you wouldn’t get the mark.
I don’t know if this applies to other exam boards. I think you should check the exam board for your A level biology.