help !! a-level psychology

i told my parents that i was thinking of changing biology to psychology. i told them that i find bio boring usually and that it can be hard, but they were just asking me if know what careers/courses i can do with it, ive done a bit research but i haven't really found something i like yet. my dad also said i should have subjects that will allow me to get a good uni course which is understandable and bio and chem (i also take health&social) go well together but idk if i can handle bio. i was able to be in a psych lesson instead of my frees to see how its like, we learnt about the behaviourist approach, involving stuff like empiricism, classical conditioning and pavlov, it seems interesting but a bit repetitive.

Reply 1

always-anxious

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What advice are you looking for? What more do you want to know about the subjects? For context I take both a-level biology and a-level psychology and I'm in year 13 :smile:

(edited 1 year ago)

Reply 2

faeriie

Original post

by always-anxious

What advice are you looking for? What more do you want to know about the subjects? For context I take both a-level biology and a-level psychology and I'm in year 13 :smile:

i know every a level is hard but how hard do you find it personally. how hard/how much is the maths? how hard/or easy is it to memorise content? what courses could i get into with it? do you have a fav part of psych? sorry for bombarding you with questions lol - im just interested and confused 😭

Reply 3

always-anxious

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Original post

by faeriie

For context, I do AQA for all subjects I mention below. Also don't worry about bombarding me with questions lol, I'm happy to help :biggrin:

It's important to remember everyone is different and had different skillsets. For me personally, biology is my hardest a-level (out of psych and socio). The mark schemes are quite specific and the maths is hard (for me, because maths is one of my weaker areas) as well as some of the content being tricky to wrap your head around. In short, the exam questions are sneaky and it's a content heavy subject, so there's a lot to keep on top of. Despite this, I find biology very interesting as it goes into detail about lots of different topics that are fascinating to learn about.

With psychology, I find the mark schemes and the content more easier to understand. Since the content is easier to understand, I find it easier to memorise the content as well (for context, I use flashcards as my main may to memorise content). There is maths in psychology, however the maths is much less heavy than it is with biology.

My favourite part of psychology is research methods (this is a very unpopular opinion I've been made aware :hide:

) and approaches because I love learning about how different methods of research can be used in psychology, and how this applies to every other topic we learn about.

Admittedly, I'm not 100% sure about the different courses you can get into psychology with, although I'm under the impression it's a respected subject by unis so there's a variety of courses psychology can help you get into. Sorry I can't give more detailed advice on this as I don't want to give you any incorrect information.

I hope this helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask and I'll answer the best I can :smile:

Reply 4

beaming-dioxide

Original post

by faeriie

As another commenter has already responded, I won't go into too much detail but Psychology is definitely a useful subject for a lot of courses, as it is considered by some unis to be a science subject. But at the end of the day it depends on what type of course your trying to do? Are you thinking of doing a more hard science based course or something non-scientific? (then I might be able to give more tailored advice) The maths in Psychology A-level is rather basic and doesn't really go beyond percentages/fractions, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication - not too heavy. There are statistical tests, but for the most part, you don't need to do them yourself - you only need to know what kind of data each is used for. Hope this helps! Fyi I'm a gap year student atm, I took chem bio and psych for A-levels (AQA Psych was definitely the easiest of the 3 in regards to memorisation for me)