I think DS3 regrets taking Chinese. He's got a really good memory and is great at reading the script which made him think he was better at Chinese than French, when in reality, languages are not his thing. He wouldn't listen to me though, so won't admit it was a mistake. The advantage of Chinese has been that it's an old style GCSE still so he might still do fairly well. It'll stand out a bit on his CV, as a talking point, maybe.
I persuaded DS1 to take French as it seemed that MFL might be looked for by universities. It was DS1's worst result, 
but had no bearing on his university place, luckily.
They've all been lucky to have competent teachers at GCSE. DS1 had a disaster with A level Computing, though. The teacher was new and completely rubbish. The class complained to SLT and he left at October half term. They didn't manage to get a replacement until Easter. The small class basically taught itself. DS1 managed to get an A at AS then decided he'd drop it. He'll probably end up working in software engineering but a qualification in computing is still not essential at this time. This may change, with computer science being more respected, but school's will always struggle to get good computing teachers. There's not enough money in it and good programmers aren't always keen on careers involving dealing more with people than computers. 