I Wish I Could Have Experienced the A-Level System in the UK

[victoria9273]

I am very jealous about A-Level system in the UK. They seem to offer some good students in sixth form tons of subjects that you can choose what to study according to your preferred major when going to a college. It's also fascinating that A-Level covers about the first year of college's studies. Of course, courseworks are so burdensome and it's not easy to get good grade since it requires your writing skills everywhere, but I think I could have studied harder being motivated by this system. Maybe you could try applying at university of Cambridge... Who knows?

Anyone from the UK to tell me more about this system and your opinions and how you went through it? Thanks.

 

[Matty1996]

Subject choice varies greatly and can be entirely different depending on your school.

For instance, I was fortunate enough to go to a school that offered Early Modern History and we studied from the crusades to the English civil war, while many many schools offer only a more general "history" course where the focus is typically on the 20th century. The same is true for different languages, with some schools offering more seldom taught language courses like Italian or Russian but the majority just French and Spanish/German.

Of course you can always take any A level of your choice outside of the school system, but barely any students going through the system the first time do this, nobody I knew did anyway.

Personally I think the system is too skewed towards academics with nowhere near enough emphasis on practical skills these days. I did and was encouraged to do 4 essay writing, humanities courses but they didn't really prepare me for a career I have to study all over again to get a horticulture apprenticeship now and in hindsight, regret not just going into an apprenticeship at 16 - I'd definitely be further ahead than I am now!

 

[Yas]

In my experience subject choice wasn't great. We had "blocks" to choose from which meant that the time some of the subjects took place clashed with others. I wanted to do economics and resorted to doing business studies because economics clashed with English etc! You also needed to meet the GCSE requirements to do the a level you wanted so sometimes low GCSE grades got in the way too!

A levels in my opinion were incredibly hard and a very stressful period, however one thing I loved was pretty much being spoon fed what I needed to pass the exam. As long as you put the time in and revised, you were fine.

Also the first year of university in my case was not covered by my a levels. I studied Criminology with Psychology. I did a level psychology but my closest a level to criminology was Sociology. I had a lot of background knowledge but I'd say I had to quite a lot to learn throughout first year!

 

[Matty1996]

You also needed to meet the GCSE requirements to do the a level you wanted so sometimes low GCSE grades got in the way too!

Hah I remember wanting to do English Lit A level, but got refused by my school's English department even though I passed the GCSE. Teenage me was oh so disappointed.

 

[Yas]

Hah I remember wanting to do English Lit A level, but got refused by my school's English department even though I passed the GCSE. Teenage me was oh so disappointed.

I had the same problem with Biology! I was gutted haha