📚 A Level Preparation
If you have done well in your GCSEs, you may feel well prepared for A level, but there are new skills required to be successful at A level. Many students find this jump quite daunting and it is sensible to make sure you are fully prepared.
If you are reasonably quick at picking up new ideas and are able to understand and explain what is taught in class, you will do well at GCSE. However, A level requires applied thinking and opinion forming. Many students get a great deal of satisfaction from learning the advanced skills they require to do well at A level and they will tell you that their enjoyment increases with the difficulty. However, in order to succeed there are some important points to consider:
🎓 Choose subjects you enjoy
If you choose subjects you have a genuine interest in and aptitude for, you are more likely to find the work rewarding. If you lack this interest, you will find it hard to do the necessary reading and work required to get a top grade. Teachers will also expect you to have a personal interest in the subjects you are studying (as they do!). You will be working with a small cohort of students (a maximum class size of nine students) and you will get to know your teachers well.
Some subjects are classified as facilitating subjects by the Russell group universities. These subjects have a reputation for having a ‘jump’ in difficulty between GCSE and A level and are favoured by top universities for certain degree courses.
✍🏻 Revise wisely
Many students only put some concerted revision into the final months of their GCSE course and still manage to achieve good results. However, at A level, revision must be a regular part of your work routine. This is the reason Brampton College tests its students regularly throughout the academic year. The tests are not about remembering information, but using it!
Time management is a new skill for students to acquire. Your timetable will not look as full as it did in year 11 and every day will have ‘free periods’. It takes some real discipline to use these wisely. Spending time when you get your timetable in September, considering how you can get all the homework assignments done and revising regularly can be the key to early success. At Brampton College, we provide our students with a planner to make sure all deadlines can be met whilst also factoring in time to relax and enjoy extracurricular activities.
📓 Learn to build on ideas
A levels are more about applying ideas than learning and understanding them. You will be expected to think for yourself, compose original work, dedicate time to reading about a subject and build on the ideas you have been introduced to in your lessons. This will mean using (or improving) your organisational and analytical skills. Whilst ideas can be introduced in lessons and you may understand them when the teacher goes through them, it will only be when you go away and think about the ideas and then apply them for yourself that you will have reached a good A level standard.
🗒 Maintain a balance with extracurricular activities
It is important to ensure you keep a balance between your academic work and other important activities that keep a healthy work-life balance. Regular exercise, having time to help others by getting involved in charity work and doing valuable work experience are important in developing the soft skills needed for university life and beyond.
📖 Use your tutors well
Your teachers will know that the transition between one level of learning and another is difficult. At Brampton College, we encourage students to talk to their teachers if they are finding it hard or are struggling with the workload. They will encourage you to use our tutorials to get some help. Your personal tutor will also be keen to talk to you and offer help.
☕︎ Prepare before you start
It is useful to look over your GCSE notes over the summer to remind yourself about the background information you should know. Regardless of the subjects you choose, it is important to read well and often. If you improve your literacy so will your performance.
A level students are expected to be independent learners. We recommend you read relevant magazines like the Economist or New Scientist for example to make sure you understand the relevance of the subject you are studying in a wider context. Brampton College is on the edge of London and there is a wealth of museums, theatres, and lectures open to students over the summer holidays and during term time. These opportunities can help develop your understanding and interest in your A level subjects.
💻 What I wish I’d known before starting my A-levels
10 Tips to Ace Your A Level Results
One of the main goals of high school classes is to get good grades that will help you get into the right university. But with so many subjects and other distractions, how do you prepare for your exams and ace them? Alexander Pentchev excelled in his A Levels and has outlined the top 10 tips (and a few mini tips) for you to do the same.
🧑🎓 What are some tips to ace your A Level exams?
1. Stay on top of your content throughout the year
DO NOT let things slide if you don’t understand them. Make sure you understand them before going into new content. Do your best to understand concepts to a fundamental level and stay on top of things. You don’t necessarily have to memorise everything as long as you understand it.
2. Understand what exams you will be taking at the end of the year
Knowing what exams you’re doing at the start of the year sets you up and gives you a direction to the goals you want to achieve. Note down what papers you have. How long is each paper? What will each paper involve? And what will you have to know for each paper. The earlier you know what exams you will be taking, the earlier you can prepare for them
3. Textbooks are your best friends
Before class, read the textbook until you understand the knowledge at a basic level. This is almost a new consolidation of that knowledge, even if you don’t write notes after every class. You’d probably have about 6 tests a year, so you could write a nice set of condensed notes about all the content as a review. Before each test look over these notes, recognize what you’ve forgotten and then convert these to flashcards, and memorise the flashcards. Memorising concepts is about repetition so the more times you go over at it the more neuroconnections form – it’s that simple really!
4. Set learning objectives
At the end of the year when you’re studying for your exams, each subject will generally have a list of learning objectives (syllabus). Make sure you go through them and check that you understand each point. Understanding each of those learning objectives is very key so that if you know all the learning objectives at least to a primal level, you should be able to answer every question in the exam to some certain point .
5. Treat the mock exams like the real thing
It’s a great way to practise, to go over content from the start of the year and do past papers. You can study for it as if you’re at your A-level exams, and that should set you up. Although you will be learning new content at this stage and might not have a lot of free time, you can take it as seriously as you can. Definitely DON’T do every past paper for the mock exams at once because that means you won’t have any left for the end of year exams. When you receive your checked exam papers, critically analyse your mistakes and what you don’t know as this could highlight weakness you didn’t realize you had.
6. Do the past year papers
The way to prepare for your exam is just to do past year papers (at least the last five years) since questions often repeat themselves. Past year papers are the best resource out there as they give you an idea of what they can assess you on and how they ask questions. Practicing these papers will make you feel more comfortable when you’re doing the A-levels exams because you know what to expect.
7. Learn the mark scheme
This goes against what education is all about but in the end you don’t hate the player, you hate the game. Acknowledge what key points the examiners want, what commonalities each of them have between years and then apply that to exams. For some subjects similar questions will have the same number of points. If you can memorise these points, every single time you get a similar question, you’ll be able to get those full marks.
8. Make a list of exam tips for each subject
For example, Math: write answers to 3 significant figures, so instead of having a piece of paper packed with content you don’t know, you could have another piece of paper with exam tips you should know. Fundamental idea is that you do past year papers, and these exam tips are derived from those past papers. It’s not content based, yet it allows you to become a better exam taker.
9. Always aim for a 100%
Make sure you know everything in the textbook, and you do as many past papers as possible, so you know what each question could be. You should always aim for 100% even if you don’t think you will get an A*. If you aim for the moon and miss, you will still land among the stars. This is the perfect analogy for A levels. Go for the 100%, if you don’t reach as most people don’t, you will hopefully at least get an A or an A*.
10. Take time to plan out your studies
Two months would be ideal to ensure you’ve gone through all the content and you’ve done the past papers. For each subject, make a list to go through each unit, then note how many years of past papers you want to do. You might to spend a whole day planning for each subject, so you have everything you want to do, every content piece you want to do, every past year you want to do. And then start with your exam date and work back from that date. If you plug it in backwards correctly, that will allow you to have a starting date of when you need to start. This is so you plan your study from when your exam is rather than from where it is now, and that sort of indicates to you when you should start or when you need to hurry up and get back on track. This tip will lay a clean smooth path up to the exam.