4 As at AH (chem, physics, bio, maths) Ask Me Anything!

Hi Maryam ,
I have a bunch of different questions. I take ah math right now and let me just see it’s really confusing and I’m taking a year early so you would think I should be good but I’m getting really worked up about stuff now and I just can’t seem to find my foot and I don’t think you can really help me with that,
also I do higher physics and my assignments are coming up. I’m trying to do acceleration on a slope and I’m just trying to make sure I have all the right requirements cause I did really bad on my national 5
then also my chemistry I have a really bad higher chemistry teacher as she doesn’t really go for stuff like she does like a unit in like 4 weeks so that’s something so if you have any notes or any place that you think would really help that would be so helpful, thank you

Hello,
I have added a link to some resources in the original post hopefully those should help. JABchem is also really good for chemistry, they have complete explanations of past papers so I would recommend. There are also lots of really good YouTube playlists going through the whole course so if you are struggling to keep up in class I would recommend using them to supplement.
For maths, so cool you're doing it a year early - do you mean AH or Higher? My school would never let anyone do that even though I knew a few students definitely could have. I think it is just a case of doing lots of practice second and first trying to really conceptually understand where everything comes from. I very rarely got confused with maths or had to revise partly because I could explain most things to myself almost from first principles or at least principles that felt like first principles to me, so I would recommend watching explanations, asking your teachers to get in the weeds of things - often that helps things stick.
For assignments, I would read the assignment document very carefully. It gives detailed guidance for candidates and marking instructions. So long as you follow everything there you can't go wrong!
Let me know if you have any other questions about AH x

What was it like balancing the workload?

Hello everyone! I'm Maryam, did my AHs last year and applied for Medicine, currently on a gap year before I start at Cambridge in October, all going well.
I thought I would start a thread for AH students to ask any questions at all - since we are getting closer to exam time and a lot of people will have just had mocks, be finishing off their coursework just now and planning revision for final exams soon.
I also wanted to make this thread for anyone who had already or will be soon selecting their AH subjects and/or considering whether to do AH at all. I think there's a bit of mystery around what the courses actually entail before you sign up (not to mention a lot of schools around Scotland hardly teach them as they're not required for uni) and that leaves a lot of students doing a lot of guesswork over the year.
Feel free to ask anything, whether that's work life balance, study tips, resources, specifics of any of the subjects I took - like it says in the title I took Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Maths (Pure). I got A1s in Bio and Maths, and A2 in Chem and Physics (although I was only one mark off for physics and if anyone is familiar with physics that is definitely marking error but oh well) and As in all the projects too.
Here are some links to other threads where I've been giving advice.
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7645507#post101018715
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7497367
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7646921#post101088855
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7651816
Feel free to ask me about other AHs as well (I might be able to give general advice from what my friends told me) or S6 life in general, though this does depend on school obviously, but my main area of "expertise" is AH science subjects.
Best of luck with studying everyone, you're going to smash those exams x
Edit: I am adding a link here to my notes as well, as I get a lot of messages/enquiries about course resources and always share these links so I thought to save time I would put them here. These are the notes I used when studying so they should have all the information, although of course always check the course specs as well.
Higher
Biology: https://maryammajick2687.notion.site/Biology-582f6488ac8c4e3689b4a9d5f2b0f6ff?source=copy_link
Chemistry: https://maryammajick2687.notion.site/Chemistry-9941027c6503434dafb59beb2658a649?source=copy_link
Physics: https://maryammajick2687.notion.site/Physics-0f3b20866dd8408b891d25e66a1194e1?source=copy_link
Advanced Higher
Biology: https://maryammajick2687.notion.site/Biology-5eda598104374d8d936b2f0bee07fd9f?source=copy_link
Chemistry: https://maryammajick2687.notion.site/Chemistry-7bc77ce15948442193233a720d75b16c?source=copy_link
Physics: https://maryammajick2687.notion.site/Physics-bf0c4b2240ee492fabf265498477c061?source=copy_link
I don't have any notes for Maths unfortunately as I didn't really make notes for it I just did past papers for Higher and for AH I used my teacher's notes which he luckily sent to us all on OneNote. I would highly recommend the Leckie and Leckie textbooks though, they are very good, clear explanations and HSN maths notes for Higher and the Zeta maths checklists for Higher and Nat 5 (I used them instead of making notes personally)
Also ChatGPT, I know people have different views on AI but I really think this is a game changer, not everyone has access to on demand expert maths/tutoring help, so if you have made an attempt at a question but are still stuck this often helped me iron out mistakes. Of course, it doesn't really work if you are trying to learn things from scratch. I really like Organic Chem Tutor on YouTube as well for niche maths topics, he gives really clear explanations.
Also, apparently everyone and their mother knows about this but I didn't so I'll put it here in case it helps someone - Dynamic Maths! It's a great website for maths at all levels where you can find past papers for specific topics, and I mean really filter to subtopics within subtopics. I think everyone is used to using [mathslevel].co.uk, e.g. for AH because they run more ads on Google or something but Dynamic Maths and JABchem are superior imo.

How do I study for my Nat5s?

I don’t want to keep disturbing you about the advanced highers projects, but…
Should I calculate every uncertainty that exists? This includes the length and period squared uncertainties (for the pendulums). I’m not sure whether this is actually necessary or not as many other examples just use “gradient uncertainty” and say that the other ones are “negligible.” But shouldn’t I show the marker that they are actually negligible?

So I should calculate the all uncertainties and include them. Do I mention that the source uncertainties don't play a role in the uncertainty of g as only the gradient affects the final value?

You don't need to explicitly mention that (I would avoid saying anything unnecessary as I was struggling to keep the word count down so anything that is standard procedure, like ignoring irrelevant uncertainties, you can just assume the marker will pick up from your working) - the way I did is just put a heading for source uncertainties and then calculated it for each variable and then "uncertainty in gradient" and showed my method for calculating that (which was just excel lol but still) and then I had the final section "uncertainty in g" (and you should do whatever you are calculating the quantity of) and just showed what the uncertainty in g is based on the formula used to calculate it.
But yes you should still include all the source uncertainty calculations because that is its own mark. Hope that makes sense x

Okay thanks!
To be honest, I'm not really at the point where I am going to go over the word limit.
I'm assuming the word limit is what the project task document says like... Title page, contents pages, graphs diagrams etc, those don't count towards the word limits right? Because if those don't count, I still have quite a lot of words that I can write