GCSE '18s (20) - half term beckons!

[mmmz]

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/further_education/3355907-gcse-18s-19-new-beginnings

Sticker may well be too short notice, but have you seen this page about contacting colleges/departments to be shown around? Might be worth an email to the department your DD is interested in on the off-chance someone is available later

www.dur.ac.uk/study/ug/visit/depts/

Other than that, Durham is a very small city so it will be easy to wander and get a good feel for the place. Are you staying overnight?

Is she yearning for independence, Stickerrocks?

DS1 is looking forward to leaving home too, but I don't think he's thought through things like he'll have to shop for and cook his own meals and do the dishes every night.

Stickerrocks as long as your DD is over 90 mins away, she'll feel like she had properly left home.

Very roughly speaking, is there a sort of generally accepted heirarchy for university in England? I know Oxford and Cambridge are at the top (and they subdivide into colleges), but what's on the next tier? Maybe LSE, Imperial and...?

Our does it all depend on the subject?

depends very much on the subject - but there are several tables available for overall league tables and by subject (the times is a good one). As a general rule the more traditional subjects follow the overall rankings but some 'lower ranked' unis have developed specific specialties that make them desirable in that subject.

Off the top of my head would come warwick, durham, imperial, UCL, St Andrews as just below Oxbridge, then Bristol, Exeter, etc but there are several I will have missed without looking at the lists. Some insit on Russell group but there are a number of good unis outside that group too especially for specific subjects

I’d swap Edinburgh for St Andrews in your first group.

And just as examples Bath, Bath Spa, Loughborough, Leeds, Sussex, Surrey are some of the non Russel group or newer less obvious places with good reputations in some courses. And clearly the top group will be asking for top grades so dc with less stellar grades will need to widen the list too. And some of the newer less obvious uni s are developing strong industry links and work placements etc and are more practical and modern day career focused which also suits some dc better than sitting in big lecture halls. It’s very much horses for courses so worth doing some broad research to thing about what the dc want before just touring the top 5. ‘Best’ is not necessarily right for you dc

It would be interesting to know what % of students at St Andrews and Edinburgh are Scottish.
I'm told - probably unreliably - that both universities like having English fee paying students over the homegrown ones, so if you are Scottish, you have to be exceptional to get into St Andrews and unusually good to get into Edinburgh.

Oratory1 those are good points.

DS doesn't know what he wants to do. It will hve to be maths related, but beyond that all he knows is that it won't be physics and if engineering is all about creativity, then it won't be engineering either.

Everywhere does maths degrees, so its difficult to know where to look or what to look at whilst he is like this. The City would have suited him, but its in decline.

Whistle - what about Economics? Pick the right course and it's nearly all maths.

DD now exploring Politics & International Relations.
Anyone know anything about this subject?

Yes that's difficult whistl. It was easier for DD2 as not everywhere did her course and only half of those did it in the way she was interested in so only a dozen to choose from. Then narrowing down further on reputation and location only left four or five to pick from.

For DD2 a lot did her course but on investigation again it was taught in different ways at different places and factoring location (away from home but not too far as to make travelling back and forth difficult) and size of city/type of campus soon narrowed it down to a manageable list. I m not sure what distinguishes maths based courses but hopefully some others might be able to help.

Toward the end of this year and into next I think you will find there is a lot of chat at school too so they will get more info and form opinions from their peers (but beware of teachers leading them based on what it was like as swell

oops not sire what happened there

• based on what it was like in their day !!! Certain schools definitely gravitate towards certain universities too

There were definitely younger (and so I would guess year 10/11 kids at Warwick and Durham with their year 12/13 siblings). It would make sense even if it were to just rule somewhere out as absolutely hating it and also having a better idea of what there is should sibling 2 want to have another look when it is their time! And obviously all kids are different so even if older sibling reports back they disliked somewhere younger one might like it.

Whistl my neighbour took both his Dds on the uni open days so it was easier second time round! Ironically his elder dd didn't go to uni! But the younger one is.
At the moment I'm too swamped to think about open days as well - it would be different if DS had firmer ideas but he's only been studying his A levels for 5 weeks and to be honest it's a lot easier for me to do stuff in June/July, even if that will be a bit hectic! I think medics, for example, do need to do this sort of thing early - and for those who know what they want it's good timing - but there is no danger of DS1 going down that route!

whistl I think there is a fairly well-established pecking order when it comes to maths degrees (Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial & Warwick spring to mind although I’m certainly no expert) but I guess it will depend on where his particular interests lie. I would guess that your DS’s school will be very well informed when it comes to the time to choose course/university.

bpisok DS also exploring IR, hence our visit to the Cambridge study day this Saturday. If you’re in/near London there’s an IR evening lecture in early December at the New College of the Humanities which I’ve booked DS on to. There’s also a 1-day masterclass in January, run by Debate Chamber, again in London. DD did one of their summer schools a few years ago and was impressed.

In terms of universities, lots of them seem to offer the course in various guises. DS hasn’t done any serious digging yet in terms of what they offer and how the courses are structured.

@KingscoteStaff - I can vouch for the quality of Edinburgh alumni from personal experience 😉 Far superior to St Andrews!

Well here we are at KCL and it became clear fairly quickly that they weren't expecting parents to stay. I wasn't the only one, but DD told me to go away, albeit with a rather terrified expression on her face!

Am currently loitering in Covent Garden to regain some energy and contemplating some early Christmas shopping.

And also hoping that we will actually succeed in meeting up afterwards - they are going on a tour to the Waterloo campus and I don't yet have any idea where that is!!

We're not taking the younger ones round with us on DS2's open day tour. They are not at the same ability level and the places he is looking at are likely to be out of their league.

So if they want to apply to university, we'll be doing it all again.

Thanks cherryburn!!
Yes I do live in London so I will investigate...
I also found out that there's a new(ish) Thameslink route that goes direct to Cambridge in 1 1/2 hours from a station near me, so we can easily do a day trip when we get our acts together.

GCSE stuff dealt with! We kept everything to do with A-Level subjects. Then we separated paper and notes from folders, plastic and textbooks to make recycling easier. Then we weighted just the paper which came to 40Kg!!!

Can I be really cheeky and ask a question of you veterans of GCSE? My Ds is in year 10 and I have just had his Professional Predicted Grades 1 from
school. Some of them are a bit lower than we would have expected and I was wondering if you remember how accurate predictions were for your dc? And if your dc had lower predictions than achieved, have you any recommendations on things that helped to achieve that? Thanks for any advice.

mary DS's predictions were broadly accurate, except for English, where unfortunately the actual results were lower than the school continuously predicted.

Geography ended up higher - school predicted 8 at first, then 7, then 6, then 8, and he got a 9. I think the reason was the school had absolutely no idea where the grade boundaries would be.

Not knowing what the ballpark for the grade boundaries (except English and maths) made predicting grades for the June 2018 exams a bit of a stab in the dark. Going forward, it should be a lot easier for teachers to predict with some accuracy.

As to revision aids... I think between us we have tried and tested them all, and there were some clear favourites. Tell us which subjects you need suggestions for and I think you'll get some good suggestions.

Thanks whistl! You have been so helpful on the other thread too. Science and French are his lowest at the moment. He is doing combined science but says he finds physics tricky.

Yes, I can imagine predicting for 2018 as the first of the full 1-9 cohort was very difficult. Thanks for your feedback.

Science - tassomai is the best solution. However it is expensive and even tassomai would say that its best left until September 2019.

Meanwhile there is Seneca senecalearning.com/ and numerous free explainer videos on youtube. freesciencelessons was a favourite of DS and most of his classmates, but Primrose Kitten was the other equally good one. One will probably suit your DS more.

French - you have the online things like memrise and duolingo (both free I think). the revision guides made all the difference to DS. (He got an 8 - 3 marks off a 9 for French). French is all about the vocabulary, so its just a mountain of memorising.

Revision guides are invaluable for every subject and well worth buying now (typically £8 a go), but you need to know the exam board and the exact papers (because sometimes there are several options eg in History).

Brilliant. So helpful. He has Seneca already for science and likes it so that's great. I will investigate Tassomai for next year and also get the revision guides. I know all the boards he is doing so that's good.

That's impressive about your ds' french result. Agreed it's all about putting the effort in to memorise. Thanks again.

One more question - with regard to revision guides, did you find it worthwhile to get the ones that include practice papers? They are slightly more expensive but if they were useful, it might be worth it.