Is it too early for an A level support thread!

[HereWeGo2023]

Hello all, apologies if there is already a thread but I can’t find one.
May had finally rolled around and the first exam is a mere 2 weeks away. Exam stress has hit our house! It’s feels like everything is about waiting at the moment - waiting for the predicted grades, waiting for the uni offers, waiting for the exams to start, and then the long wait for the results!
This is our youngest DD but the first one in further education so would love to chat to other parents going through this

I read that this cohort was too old to have had the men b vacc. So they should get it now

Well done to all the dc who have finished exams, the relief must be huge! Dd is only halfway through, and on countdown to 23 June. Sleeping badly because of the heat and waking up too early, but she’s hanging in there, just about.

One exam to go for a very over heated DD. Politics on Friday am. She has pub plans for lunchtime.
DS is a first year at UoN - it's been a rather sad/stressful/strange couple of days. My heart goes out to those poor parents and families.

My DD did stats and mechanics AQA FM papers today, for those asking. She finally came out of her room, with almost a smile on her face and said "I've just realised, I've probably got 72% on FM, if I assume 20 marks of silly mistakes". Which is exactly what I told her hours ago, but she was in too much of a state to listen.

What a fun day you must have had @astuz I know DS2 sometimes copes with revision stress by announcing that it's all useless and he can't remember anything and his brain isn't capable of retaining the information. And then he goes into exams and performs well (usually, fingers crossed). I'm beginning to think it's all a part of his process - he kind of needs to embody and express the fear before he can move on! Maybe something like this is true for your DD?

Physics paper 3 here today (AQA). DS2 doesn't like this one much - it covers practicals and he says getting up to around 50% is easy and after that you have to work your arse off for single points here and there. I'm just fretting about whether the trains will decide to stop working on his way into school - he only has two morning exams and this is one of them.

AQA Physics for us too, @PacificState and so far they have been dreadful, only mitigated by the quality of the memes afterwards. I have high/low hopes of the same again today. Even DS' Physics tutor said Paper 3 is really hard and no-one does well on it - as you say, you have to just chase the odd point here or there and hope for the best.

For us the highlight is that this is the end of Physics forever. He's hated it pretty much from the start but for various reasons it seemed too difficult to change to something else.

Ahhh that's interesting that it's the consensus @tribpot I didn't know whether it was just DS2's personal bugbear. Hope your DS has an end-of-physics celebration planned (blowing up a Bunsen burner?). Must suck to study it when you don't even like it - it's not exactly a friendly subject. DS2 doesn't mind it (he's hoping to do engineering at uni) but hasn't enjoyed the A Level much. For him it's an uncomfortable halfway house between hands-on engineering and maths, and involves far too much memorising. I suspect some notes will be going in the fire pit later.

Physics today is ds’ most dreaded

No end-of-Physics celebration planned as it's straight on to Biology tomorrow morning (very different experience and this is what he's going to do at uni). I kind of resent setting fire to all his Physics and Maths Tutor handouts as they were so expensive to print at the local print shop 😂I think his cousin may be doing AQA Physics as well (in Y12) so I'm going to see if he wants them first.

If your DS is feeling down after the exam today @PacificState I can recommend searching AQA Physics Alevel on Twitter as the memes will start flowing within minutes of the exam finishing. I will post some links to some choice ones here!

Break a leg for Physics etc today.

Biology tomorrow and English Lit in afternoon. Two.

Less than a week to go now.

Good luck to all fellow Physics parents and their DC who will be SO glad when this morning is over and A-level Physics can GET IN THE BIN!!!

@tribpot your DS's experience sounds very similar to my DD's. She realised she had made a huge mistake choosing Physics during Y12 but changing course was very much discouraged by school until it was too late and in hindsight I wish we had pressed the issue harder as I'm certain she could have caught up with the subject she would have swapped to - psychology - as she is very hard working and I believe there is quite a lot of content crossover with Biology which is her strongest subject.

School just kept telling her to stick with it and with hard work she would get there but I just don't think her brain works the right way for Physics! She can (and has!) learned all the content inside out but struggles to apply the theory/knowledge to the way Physics questions are asked in the exams.
It's a shame really as she loved GCSE physics and got a 9. Everyone tried to warn her that A-level Physics was a different ball game but she unfortunately had to find out the hard way.

Anyway!! It will all be over soon thank goodness, then just the two final Biology exams to go, which will still be challenging as she is exhausted, but at least no more bloody Physics !!!

My DD dropped physics after a year - she was brilliant at it at GCSE, level 9 with no revision, but even though she still enjoyed it at A-level, she found it much harder, and it was taking up a disproportionate amount of time to keep on top of. It's also been the worst subject for having no teachers, so she was having to self-teach physics even more so than the others.

Even though she was doing 4 A-levels though, I had to be very firm with the school to let her drop it. They initially claimed she just wasn't allowed (rubbish), then tried to tell me maths & further maths were one A-level (also rubbish), then eventually they stonewalled us. She carried on going to A-level physics lessons in Y13 for about 2 weeks, waiting for the formal nod to say she could drop it, but they just kept saying "we haven't done the paperwork yet" or "we haven't had time to discuss it" or just ignored us completely. So in the end, I told her to just stop going to the lessons, and I sent an email telling the school that she was dropping physics and not attending any more lessons with my permission.

Her school is so shit.

AQA physics here too - DS a bit quiet on the way in this morning. I think he wonders if should have dropped physics and kept FM, but teachers’ advice last year was to drop FM after AS and continue with physics. He still has Comp Sci and maths next week but I think there will be a big sigh of relief once today is over.

Such battles. Good job you were there to advocate for her. Such a shame too about Physics lack of teachers etc as more women needed in the field.

Shame on the government for underfunding education and putting this pressure on kids and their parents/carers. It doesn't have to be like this.

Good luck to all those doing Physics today - I totally empathise, it was my most hated subject at A-level, no idea why I did it, probably just because the Biology teacher was useless. Last exam for DS tomorrow, Politics paper 3 which looks at US politics, even his teacher calls it a 'race to the bottom' as it is so hard and drags the marks down from other papers.

Break a leg for politics too

I thought you had to do four if you did Further Maths and Maths

I know it’s the case at Ds’ school and I have seen posts about it on here

Physics OCR here “ yep quite good” was the answer I just got on text. He had told me that paper 3 is a strange one. He knows all the content but said the questions can be odd, whatever that means. I just hope it’s enough to get him the A that he needs for his uni place. He had been hoping for an A* but after paper 1 he would be so so happy with an A! I hope the AQA students got a better paper today.

Verdict on AQA Physics - "that was the most horrendous thing I have ever seen".

The meme game has begun already - https://twitter.com/zolexrhd/status/1669283825715691523?s=20

However, Physics is over, hallelujah! We've agreed that even if he gets a D and could retake in November, he's not going to - he'll study a whole new subject for a year if he has to.

@MarshaBradyo You can definitely just do 3: maths,further maths and one other. Definitely accepted for maths,engineering and computer science, physics and chemistry courses. My DD got 4 offers for maths, next door neighbour got into Cambridge to do computer science on maths, further maths and physics.

I do remember a discussion on here around the time she dropped physics, but we did a lot of research and realised it was perfectly acceptable for the courses she was looking at. I think the confusion is because some courses eg. some medicine courses don't see further maths as a separate A-level, and obviously if she changed her mind and wanted to do something non-maths based, then she'd have been stuffed, so there is a risk to dropping it, but we discussed all this, researched it thoroughly, so I wasn't worried.

Same here @tribpot . DD said Paper 3 was as bad as Paper 1 and she had no idea how to answer the questions in section 1. She says she has never seen anything like them despite all the past papers and intensive tutoring 😩.

Section 2 was better (but worth less marks wise than Section 1). Just got to pray she gets some marks here and there for her workings out etc even if no actually correct answers.

Thankfully she's not as distraught this time. Our plan B is also for a year out and to do another A-level in a year. Biomed at Uni can wait a year if needs be but absolutely no more physics ever!!!

Yikes. Not heard from DS2 yet. As DP keeps saying, DS would definitely get an A star in 'winding my mother up'

@MarshaBradyo maths and FM definitely count as two A levels, even if you're only taking three. I think Imperial can be a bit sniffy about it, and maybe NatSci at Cambridge, but most unis are fine with that combo as a way into maths-based degrees.

TSR reckons the astrophysics option wasn’t too bad for AQA physics? I really hope so 🤞

So sorry to hear that AQA physics dealt another low blow. Grade boundaries will reflect this so hang onto that. Not so easy for the students though. At DS’s school they have kept on and on about how everything is returning back to “normal” this year and the grade boundaries will be similar to 2019. As if they are not stressed enough. So DS has been trying to add up the marks he thinks he got and comparing to 2019! Hopefully after the last exam next week they will forget about it and enjoy the summer.

Yeah, DS2 going with the consensus on AQA Physics. He says it was bad