The Student Room Group

religious studies a level

hi, wondering whether to pick A level religious studies ? My exam board is EDUQAS (study judaism, ethics and philosophy)
I asked my teacher and she said she studied the exact same course at a level and really enjoyed it.
I currently do Buddhism , Christianity and Ethics at AQA GCSE and find it so easy and interesting , wondering if this ease continues to a level , especially with the change of exam board
If anyone has done this exam board (as it seems like i cannot find anyone who has done this exact course at a level with the same exam board😭) then please let me know if it is a good option !

Reply 1

Original post by user839292
hi, wondering whether to pick A level religious studies ? My exam board is EDUQAS (study judaism, ethics and philosophy)
I asked my teacher and she said she studied the exact same course at a level and really enjoyed it.
I currently do Buddhism , Christianity and Ethics at AQA GCSE and find it so easy and interesting , wondering if this ease continues to a level , especially with the change of exam board
If anyone has done this exam board (as it seems like i cannot find anyone who has done this exact course at a level with the same exam board😭) then please let me know if it is a good option !

Hi, I did that exact same A Level! (Judaism, Philosophy and Ethics with eduqas). I was the same at GCSE (although I did eduqas then too), I enjoyed it and found it relatively easy compared to my other subjects. So, on to the A level. I enjoyed the lessons and the content, but as much as I really want to recommend it to you, sadly I can't say I enjoyed it overall because of the stress. There is a crazy amount of content and while you were technically doing critical writing and forming arguments, it still felt to me like I was learning a bunch of information only to regurgitate it in an exam. You had to learn everything in such detail so that you could write a full essay on a very specific topic when asked to. And since that exam board is the only one not to have any coursework, how you do on those specific topics is 100% of your grade.

Now maybe that view is because all I had to compare it to were my other A Levels (Art and English Literature), which were both very different. Art was, well art, and English was very skill based rather than content based. So yeah, I did truly find the content really interesting, but that was my experience and to be honest if I were choosing again, I would choose another subject. Talking to the rest of my class, it seemed like they felt the same way as me.

If you do choose it though, it does have a lot to offer and I would love to help you out where you wanted it :-)

Reply 2

Original post by Pablopip

Hi, I did that exact same A Level! (Judaism, Philosophy and Ethics with eduqas). I was the same at GCSE (although I did eduqas then too), I enjoyed it and found it relatively easy compared to my other subjects. So, on to the A level. I enjoyed the lessons and the content, but as much as I really want to recommend it to you, sadly I can't say I enjoyed it overall because of the stress. There is a crazy amount of content and while you were technically doing critical writing and forming arguments, it still felt to me like I was learning a bunch of information only to regurgitate it in an exam. You had to learn everything in such detail so that you could write a full essay on a very specific topic when asked to. And since that exam board is the only one not to have any coursework, how you do on those specific topics is 100% of your grade.

Now maybe that view is because all I had to compare it to were my other A Levels (Art and English Literature), which were both very different. Art was, well art, and English was very skill based rather than content based. So yeah, I did truly find the content really interesting, but that was my experience and to be honest if I were choosing again, I would choose another subject. Talking to the rest of my class, it seemed like they felt the same way as me.

If you do choose it though, it does have a lot to offer and I would love to help you out where you wanted it :-)


thanks so muchh this was so helpful

Reply 3

Original post by Pablopip
Hi, I did that exact same A Level! (Judaism, Philosophy and Ethics with eduqas). I was the same at GCSE (although I did eduqas then too), I enjoyed it and found it relatively easy compared to my other subjects. So, on to the A level. I enjoyed the lessons and the content, but as much as I really want to recommend it to you, sadly I can't say I enjoyed it overall because of the stress. There is a crazy amount of content and while you were technically doing critical writing and forming arguments, it still felt to me like I was learning a bunch of information only to regurgitate it in an exam. You had to learn everything in such detail so that you could write a full essay on a very specific topic when asked to. And since that exam board is the only one not to have any coursework, how you do on those specific topics is 100% of your grade.
Now maybe that view is because all I had to compare it to were my other A Levels (Art and English Literature), which were both very different. Art was, well art, and English was very skill based rather than content based. So yeah, I did truly find the content really interesting, but that was my experience and to be honest if I were choosing again, I would choose another subject. Talking to the rest of my class, it seemed like they felt the same way as me.
If you do choose it though, it does have a lot to offer and I would love to help you out where you wanted it :-)

So do you recommend the subject yes or no?

Reply 4

Original post by Brianstudy01
So do you recommend the subject yes or no?


To summarise what I said, I enjoyed the content but found there was too much which made it extremely stressful. If I were choosing again I would pick something else so I guess overall I wouldn't recommend it

Reply 5

Original post by Pablopip
To summarise what I said, I enjoyed the content but found there was too much which made it extremely stressful. If I were choosing again I would pick something else so I guess overall I wouldn't recommend it

Do you think it has more content then sociology law or psych

Reply 6

Original post by Brianstudy01
Do you think it has more content then sociology law or psych


From talking to friends sociology was similar. I don't know about either of the others. If it had coursework I would've found it better

Reply 7

Original post by Pablopip
From talking to friends sociology was similar. I don't know about either of the others. If it had coursework I would've found it better

People say is like 3 subjects because is philosophy religion and ethics is that how much content there is and do you find it more hard than your other chosen subjects as well and does your friend do both sociology and religion and philosophy and ethics and let her know which is harder content wise and more memorisation which know both definitely has???

Reply 8

Original post by Brianstudy01
People say is like 3 subjects because is philosophy religion and ethics is that how much content there is and do you find it more hard than your other chosen subjects as well and does your friend do both sociology and religion and philosophy and ethics and let her know which is harder content wise and more memorisation which know both definitely has???

Yes, it felt like that to me. It's sad because I found what we were learning interesting. There was just way too much of it. Yes my friend did both, and said it was similar content wise. It also makes a difference what exam board you have, because some have coursework and some don't. Annoyingly a can't remember which one she did. She preferred sociology but that might just be her personally. She went on to study law at uni, but she hadn't done it as an A Level as it wasn't an option at my sixth form. My other subjects were Art and English Lit (and core maths). Both completely different to RPE. It's obvious why art's different, but English surprised me. There was hardly any content, I did a fraction of the amount of revision I did for RPE and still got a better grade. My friend's third subject was English as well, and she completely agreed with me on that count.

Reply 9

In Y13. I have to agree that there's too much content. My teachers found it so bad this year that they've decided to switch to AQA.

The people in my class who do Sociology say that RE is harder, but that might also be because our RE lessons have been a mess. I do AQA English Language and I think RE has wayyyy more content than that. I think RE content might even be comparable with History (I do edexcel history).

The good things are that you get a lot of choices for questions. All the papers are the same style. You have a choice between 2 questions in section A and a choice between 3 questions in section B. So if there's one or two topics you completely don't get, then you don't need to stress too much. It's an issue if you end up like my class - we don't understand about half the course...

Also the religion component is relatively easy. We do Islam. Philosophy and Ethics are harder and have more content it seems.

Quick Reply