Do students doing "harder" A levels get lower offers?

[Sarahcoggles]

DS is in year 13 and is about to submit is UCAS form, hoping to study geography.

Looking at universities, they all state their entry requirements in A level grades or UCAS points.

DS is kicking himself for choosing 3 tough A levels (history, geography and French), rather than choosing subjects like sociology, media etc which are traditionally less demanding. French in particular is incredibly difficult, totally different from the GCSE. He says that his offers will be for the same grades as pupils doing easier A levels, but will be much harder to achieve for him.

Is he right? Or do universities modify offers depending on how challenging a particular subject is?

Please don't accuse me of being snobby by the way. It's just simple fact that further maths, for example, is going to be more difficult than health and social care.

..and?

Had to scroll all the way back to remind myself. Do you realise how much has changed in education since 2008? Including the reform of all A levels.

The term ‘facilitating subject’ may not be officially used now but the concept is still there. This is from the Cambridge website now:

If your interests are in Arts, Social Science or Humanities but you’re not sure exactly what degree you want to study, we’d recommend considering: English Literature, History, languages and Mathematics. Choosing at least one of these, if not more, can provide a good foundation for Arts, Social Science and Humanities applications.
Other good choices to combine with these subjects include an additional language, Ancient History, Classical Civilisation, Economics, English Language, Further Mathematics, Geography, Politics, History of Art, Law, Music, Philosophy, Psychology, Religious Studies, a science subject (Biology, Chemistry or Physics) or Sociology.
For many degrees in Arts, Social Science or Humanities it is extremely important to have an essay based subject. It may therefore seem counter-intuitive to pick a Maths or Science A Level but these can actually strengthen an application, as long as it is not replacing a crucial relevant subject and these are subjects you are talented at, these can actually strengthen an application. Many subjects, such as Law or languages, really value the skills gained from a Mathematics A Level. Others, like Archaeology or Anthropology, benefit from a knowledge of sciences - for example Biology.

So they basically recommend a core subject plus one from their ‘B’ list – interesting to see that Psychology and Sociology are on there but not Business – and the third one presumably could be anything. They also say they look at the combination of subjects and like ones that work well together, and for STEM subjects they like students with three sciences. Of course, that’s just Cambridge and other universities are a good deal less prescriptive.

I think schools that tell the kids that all A-levels are equal are actually doing them a disservice, particularly for those aiming at a competitive uni and/or course.

Bianca, yes and that remains the advice of the more academic private and state grammar schools too. It is definitely worth doing those kinds of subjects. I am a lawyer and did English Lit and History (essay subjects which is quite useful for law) and German. My twins did History and Geography (and one did economics and the other classical civilisation (and they had music/economics respectively at AS as they were one of the last years to do 4 AS exams in lower sixth )

Not the subject material.Maths is still maths and French is still French.
Yes the duration of the exam etc has changed bit my kids doing science subjects have covered pretty uch the sane syllabus as I did in 1986

Some subjects changed hugely. I have been teaching since 1992. MFL is actually one that ahs changed a lot for a range of reasons.

The research is well known to be a) biased b) flawed. But since this thread is old , I'm not keen to kick all of it off again.

I agree with you @Piggywaspushed re MFL. I took A level French in 1977. One of DD's friends took it 5 years ago, and the content was completely different to the one we did. All A level exams in 1977 were 3 hours long.

Made me laugh too. HB gets outstanding results. NLCS has had a horrific situation with their head suddenly disappearing and I know several kids leave it at sixth form this year due to being very unhappy with the communication there.

Xenia strikes me as a poster with a very very narrow view of the world today. Thinking City jobs are the only goal, getting her kids to study Law and even having to employ one of them in her Law firm!

Many kids at my son’s ‘top’ school chose stuff like economics and philosophy and then one traditional subject. All got incredible offers.

Anyway back to the OP. Difficulty is subjective. My daughter is doing physics, chemistry, maths and further maths. A combination that everybody seems impressed by. Remind her about history and English GCSEs however and she will break out into a cold sweat. She simply cannot cope with large volumes of text, analysing them and then putting her views together. The idea of ever having to do an essay again fills her with fear. So in her world, she is definitely not doing the most difficult A-levels!

HB is one of the best state grammar schools in the country, much better than many private schools. If I implied otherwise I certainly did not mean to do so.

On history A levels I have some of my 1979 A level papers - German had a 2.5 hour exam - paper 1 . Half of that one was translate a passage into German and the second half was write an essay in German on up to 400 words on one of 5 topics - in German.
Paper 2 - 2 hours - unprepared translation
Paper 3 - 2.5 hours which was answering 4 questions about some German books - presumably the literature paper

Then there was also Dictation
And finally there was also a one to one oral exam.

I did Russian A-level back in the 80s and the literature paper was written in English, so it was a bit like doing an English Lit exam, just about Russian texts. My DDs doing German A-level now have to write about one text and one film in German, but their essays are correspondingly shorter.

The speaking exam has also changed, in that DDs have to prepare a presentation and then answer questions on it, which is pretty scary but at least they know what is going to be discussed - I seem to remember for my oral you just walked into the exam room and the examiner talked about whatever they felt like!

Yes, that sounds like my German A level the year before. We read loads of books and sundry other pieces (I remember that we successfully petitioned the teacher to replace Die Plebejer proven den Aufstand with something else on the syllabus; not that Grass was totally unloved - it was having to read Coriolanus alongside it that was the final straw on that one). I assumed that the French offer of the time was equivalent. DD took French A level six years ago. I think that we really would have heard hear moan long and loud had there not been some changes in the intervening 40-odd years and I suspect that she would have thought twice about including it in her degree, even if the French component for her has been 'Business French', so little if any 'lit'.

Your DS’s ‘hard’ is my DS’s ‘easy’ - mine doing History, French and Media. Finds Media the hardest as never studied it before. It’s all subjective.

The A level French literature paper was basically an English lit paper about books written by French authors. The rest of French A level was pretty much the same as Xenia's German A level. And yes, the oral was something you couldn't prepare for unlike today's A level.

I wish I had scanned all my old exam papers but I just scanned a sample of each before I did my massive clear out but even so I seem to have all the German A level.

It is becomgin very much less taught. My older 3 children's 3 schools all had them doing German and French GCSE and starting latin to continue if they wanted (and those children did French GCSE only and in one case German GCSE only but not A level), but with my younger 2 their school just had them doing French, Spanish and latin (and they only continued French to GCSE) so none of my 5 children has done a language for A level. Only 3 of us did german in Lower Sixth and only 2 to A level in my school so even in 1979 it as a tiny tiny group. French was more popular. Amazingly the other pupil ended up living in Germany and bringing up her family there and teaches so presumably uses the German we were taught every day. There is no way my German will be as good although I can still understand it fairly well, much better than my O level French.

DD took Biology, English Lit, Chemistry and Psychology. By the end of the course, she regretted choosing Psychology. She said it was the easiest of her A Levels but so dull as it just required rote learning and regurgitating information.

How come you had access to your old exam papers @Xenia?

That's exactly what DD said about psychology @ofteninaspin. She dropped it after AS exams to the disappointment of her psychology teacher.

I have had them since 1979. Presumably after the exam we were allowed to take them away. I scanned them and most of my old archive in the last few years and threw out the originals. With my 1977 O level papers I just scanned a few sample papers so don't have every question on all papers.

I even had a cross or tick I made after the exam to remind myself which question I chose of those I answered.

They were all Cambridge board.

We weren't given exam papers to keep. London board, state school.

Just been down a wormhole reading about the history of exam boards. The London University board is now Edexcel, and AEB, which was the other board my school used, is now AQA.

I kept my exam papers too. I’m not sure if we were allowed to but I took mine anyway.

I think if we were not allowed to take the Cambridge board papers away I would not have done so and the school would not have allowed it as I was a bit of a goodie two shoes at school so not likely to break any rules. I suppose in those days with no internet or fax if someone in Papua New Guinea were allowed to take the exam 6 hours later it would not have been possible or very easy to tell them the answers (we only called my uncle in Tasmania once a year at Christmas as the call was so expensive!)

2023 is an usual year for us as it is the frst year with no children doing exams - the youngest 2 did their final post grad exams last June and my oldest child did GCSEs in 2000 and of course end of year school exams for years before that. So 2023 is a year of exam freedom (although not for their cousins who are all hard at it - my children are the oldest).

I took my papers away and dh still has his. This would have been AEB and London boards back in the early 1980s.

I was allowed to take O and A level exam papers away. My MFL A levels were much as Xenia describes, and linguists who weren't much into literature were at a huge disadvantage. I got the best German grade in the class in spite of being less good at the language element than the genuinely top person.

and linguists who weren't much into literature were at a huge disadvantage

Yes, That pretty much describes me. I was much better at actual French than analysing books.