Acing the AS

A guide on how to start studying for your sixth form exams

Trying to comprehend AS/A-level exams can be overwhelming, to say the least. The bouts of warnings and daunting encounters with previous sixth formers come to your senses this year as you face one of the most important times of your school life.

Terrified? Well, don’t be because EverythingSTEM is here to the rescue.

While everyone has a different way of studying that suits them, here are some possible ways to give you a start on how you can prepare for exams.

Specification

You heard that right. Although the specification may come across as unnecessary or useless, it is quite the opposite.

The specification outlines what and from where the exam board can ask you questions in the exam.

Downloading and reading through your subjects’ specifications can help you understand what exactly you need to (and don’t need to) study by comparing them with your textbook or teachers which can deter possible confusion. This can also be used as a planner which can dictate what you may need to learn next on the topic.

Most importantly, it outlines key information about the exam structure: what chapters come in what paper, how many marks are each paper, and how much weight they carry in the whole course.

Study Materials

Textbooks, for most subjects, provide the fundamentals of the course that you are required to study and upon which exam questions are built. Use them to your advantage by reading them not once but multiple times.

Once you have read the textbook and understood key concepts, it is vital for you to expand your horizons to external reading sources like Physics and Math Tutor, Seneca, Save My Exams, or the traditional YouTube videos that have brought us through thick and thin all these years. These not only give you more information but can help you simplify potentially complicated or ‘irritating’ topics.

Revision Techniques

It is at this time procrastination peaks as you know you are almost at the end of your studying but its far from over.

It is extremely important that you can recollect every concept you remotely understood throughout the year and practice it somewhere- almost like a progress check.

One of the best ways to do this is active recall. But not your average active recall, that's for Year 10’s. I'm talking about the active recall pro. What you do is, once completed with portions, open an empty book and just write down everything you remember from every single topic of every single subject and rinse everything. Yes, this is tiring but trust me, you will reap its rewards.

Although memorization is not a good way to study content, some concepts require you to ingrain them into your memory, especially essay subjects like Economics, History and Geography.

Lastly, group studying or teaching somebody else can be extremely helpful in remembering your studying. You might find a different way to approach a topic or just learn more from discussions with others.

And last but not least the moment we have all been waiting for…

PAST PAPERS PAST PAPERS PAST PAPERS

Are you saying you already do past papers? That may be the case but you are doing it ALL WRONG.

Yeah, you do it and you do it in timed conditions well and good but you have heard that already.

But what I bet you don't do is find TRENDS. It is likely that if you open papers from 2018 to 2023 on your search engine and compare them, there will be a similarity in the types of questions they ask and what topics carry most marks. This is why you should do all past papers

Second, you probably don't know how to use mark schemes too. This is because you ignore ASSESSMENT OBJECTIVES. Different subjects have different AO’s and each AO carries a certain amount of marks. This means you can’t give 10 marks out of 10 in a question where all AO’s are not achieved. Before you do a past paper, learn how past papers work before using them to mark papers because that’s how the examiners will do it. Sometimes, long answer questions might not even show where each mark goes which is where these AO’s play a big part in past papers.

As mentioned before there is physically no ONE way of approaching your exams, and these apply to both Years 12 and 13, but if you have no idea what to do or find this better, start it off by following these steps. In the end, however, is your own effort that matters and if you can successfully dedicate and exploit these resources at hand for your benefit, nothing is stopping you from smashing that exam (figuratively of course).