• Question: How hard did you study at school and was it hard to get to weher you are today.

    Asked by 684artc52 to Sonia, Nick, Lizzie, Andrew on 20 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by 524artc35.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 20 Jun 2015:

      That’s a difficult one. It’s been a long time ago. From memory it does not seem to be as hard as it is now.

      In my day we had 2 years for O Levels. And 2 years for A levels. No exams in the first year and everything rested on a set of exams at the second year. And no course work either. There was no retakes to improve your grades if the AS marks were not good enough. Retakes means a retake on all the exams not the ones you have a poor grade on.

      Generally meant do very little in the first year and then work like made when realised that you know nothing with 3months to the exams at which you cram 2 years work into three months.

      So don’t make this mistake since the government is returning back to the old ways – pace yourself

    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      That is a great question.
      I admit for my GCSEs I was really relaxed and only crammed the night before, but I guess we did so much revision at school I felt like I didn’t need to do any more.
      For my AS and A Levels thats when it really stepped up and I worked hard, especially at Chemistry since I found it difficult. I definitely would recommend trying to score higher at AS Level modules since they’re easier than A2 modules.
      The way that GCSEs and A Levels are set up looking for keywords and specific phrases didn’t really suit me to be honest though. I thought university was much easier since I can just splurge everything I know on the page and not worry about having to match the key words etc.

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      For my GCSEs probably not that hard – although I’m sure I complained at the time! For my A-levels I’m sure I did quite a bit more revision, but we were given some time to revise before the exams – a lot more than I remember for GCSEs. At university I worked harder each year. I almost got caught out because I found first year quite easy and then realised I had to work quite a bit harder in second year. I worked really hard on my dissertation, and that’s probably why I was offered the chance to do a PhD.

      I’m really good at working hard on anything that interests me but am a bit disorganised because I often don’t do the small things that I find a bit boring. I try to work at least as hard as my PhD students as I don’t think it would be right to ask them to work any harder than I am!

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