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GCSE help

Hi
I’m a year 11 student and I will take GCSEs in the end of year.

I chose:
Maths(done my gcse already, so no longer need to work)
Physics(done whole gcse revision) grade 9
Chemistry(done whole gcse revision) grade 9
EAL edexcel-grade 9
Biology AQA- grade 6/7
English edexcel-grade 5/6
Design and technology AQA-3/4
Geography AQA-4/5
Computer science OCR-4/5/6

My question is: can I improve my weak subjects(English,DT,CS,bio,geo) to at least grade 7s before April? I really want to get a top uni, but I just realised they require my GCSE results as well. I probably don’t need to work too much on my physics and chem before the exams.

If anyone has the experience or revision techniques
please share it to me! Many thanks.

Reply 1

Kingston Vee

Official Rep

I think the best way to see quick improvements on your grades is to chat to your teachers in those subjects and ask to go over your work and past papers. together you can highlight the areas you struggle with most to target in your revision. If you work on those with tips from your teachers you'll see fast improvements.

Try to make the most of your revision. I would recommend to focus on the subjects you have that day in your revision, stay after or before in the library making notes / flashcards, then closer to the exams swap this out for memorising the flashcards, doing past papers and getting friends to hold the flashcards and quiz you.

Try sticking to just the work hours of the day e.g. 9-6 and always have a rest day once a week where you do no studying or work at all. It's important to rest your brain and prevent burnout otherwise the studying can become useless.

If you commute, use this time to catch up on homework or revising as this will make the most out of your day and should stick to the only studying 9-5 or whichever times you set.

For improving memorisation, try out the pomodoro technique as this allows you to use your brain better and maximise memorisation. Also, it may sound silly but visual mind maps also really help as it makes you use the right hand side of your brain not just your left, and visual information is much easier to memorise than long textbooks.

Hope this helps!

Vee (kingston rep)

Reply 2

grah-

Original post

by celestial-distin

Hi
I’m a year 11 student and I will take GCSEs in the end of year.
I chose:
Maths(done my gcse already, so no longer need to work)
Physics(done whole gcse revision) grade 9
Chemistry(done whole gcse revision) grade 9
EAL edexcel-grade 9
Biology AQA- grade 6/7
English edexcel-grade 5/6
Design and technology AQA-3/4
Geography AQA-4/5
Computer science OCR-4/5/6
My question is: can I improve my weak subjects(English,DT,CS,bio,geo) to at least grade 7s before April? I really want to get a top uni, but I just realised they require my GCSE results as well. I probably don’t need to work too much on my physics and chem before the exams.
If anyone has the experience or revision techniques
please share it to me! Many thanks.

For AQA Biology in particular, I would suggest watching videos for understanding and then using the specification as your notes. I don't usually watch videos but I know they help some people. Most of the spec for aqa bio literally is the mark scheme, a lot of it is literally just notes that you could memorise and put as your exam answer. I personally made flashcards that were from the spec, and if it just described what to know i used a mix of savemyexams and pmt. I've consistently gotten 90+/100 on past bio papers and so I would highly suggest trying this, hope this helps :smile:

Reply 3

Corromo

Original post

by celestial-distin

Hi
I’m a year 11 student and I will take GCSEs in the end of year.
I chose:
Maths(done my gcse already, so no longer need to work)
Physics(done whole gcse revision) grade 9
Chemistry(done whole gcse revision) grade 9
EAL edexcel-grade 9
Biology AQA- grade 6/7
English edexcel-grade 5/6
Design and technology AQA-3/4
Geography AQA-4/5
Computer science OCR-4/5/6
My question is: can I improve my weak subjects(English,DT,CS,bio,geo) to at least grade 7s before April? I really want to get a top uni, but I just realised they require my GCSE results as well. I probably don’t need to work too much on my physics and chem before the exams.
If anyone has the experience or revision techniques
please share it to me! Many thanks.

Heyy, I'm currently in yr12, having sat my GCSEs in June. I can tell you how to improve in some of those subjects. I can't say for sure how much improvements you'll see as that will depend on the efforts you put in and how well revision techinques work for you.

You've probably heard this a thousand times from your teachers and other students but past papers are really your friend. For English, I'd focus on your weakest texts and types of writing (creative, transactional...) first and find real past paper questions and make essay plans for them. For texts and books, write out your points, list them out and find quotes relating to that point. The key is close analysis and to anaylse structure. Find techniques and write them down and say why they're important. The techniques doesn't have to be fancy, they can literally be 'violent language' and punctations, you just need to be explict when analysing them. If you want to know what the examiners like to see, I suggest searching up examiners reports. They contain examplar essays as well as why the examiners thought they were good/bad. For the books I found York Notes study guides to be really useful, they're not that expensive, as they give you lots of ideas about the text that you might not have seen before.

For DT, the best advice I have is to look at the past papers and see look at the mark scheme to see what they're actually looking for and you may see that a lot of it is common sense and very logical. The mark scheme may be different to what you have learnt about a topic.Also, remeber that 15% of the marks in the written are maths and 20% are MCQs and are very easy, 6 marks will be for drawing. You want find a process that you feel comfortable describing as those questions will also ask you to choose from 4/5 options. For example, you may be asked to choose between blow moulding, vaccum forming, injection molding etc and you only need to describe one. Aside from that flashcards and mindmaps are great to learn the content itself and if you apply the knowledge to your NEA it will help it get in your head better. Also, most people will get a higher grade on their NEA than the exam so I'd bank on that and just follow the spec closely. Remeber, you won't lose marks for things you write about, but you will lose marks for things you DONT write about.

For biology, I managed to go from a 7 to a 9 in my GCSEs and I would grind past papers. Especially for bio exam technique is very important as there's a lot of applied questions (more than other sciences I feel like). At GCSE for most subjects you can get a very high grade for just memorising the content and although this sounds easy there's a LOT of content. I would do past papers to see what words or specific phrase they look for and the more past papers you do you will see that questions can actually get very repetitive and I guarantee that lots of them will come up again in your exam and you will know the excat answer they are looking for.

In terms of general revision techniques mindmaps are very good. Start with the things you know and understand without looking at your books. Then when you've written everything you can, look in your book and fill in the extra information with a different colour pen. This way you are doing active recall. Also what I found to be very helpful was teaching a friend or a parent. Try to teach them a topic from scratch and go through all the details as you would if explaining to a toddler, trust me it works.

A quite note about unis, most unis only take GCSEs into account when they are comparing two extremely similar students who have equally as impressive A-level grades and personal statements. If they can only choose one of those applicants they may look at GCSEs to help them make their decision. Also, the biggest use for them may be that if you didn't take a preferred A-level subject they may have to look at your GCSE grade for that subject like chemistry for some engineering degrees. Even so, only super top tier unis really care about these, unis like oxbridge, imperial, UCL, ISE. I'm not saying that GCSE grades aren't important but you don't need to aim for all 8-9s to get into a good uni. A few 7s and the occasional 6 will still get you into an amazing uni as A-levels matter a lot more.

I hope that helps, if you have any questions please ask 🙂