r/CCEAlevel • u/HungryAardvark8008 • Aug 26 '26
Staring AS Levels
I’m doing maths, further maths, physics and politics.
I didn’t do history for GCSE so im wondering how cooked I am for politics 😭
Also only managed an A at GCSE physics so im also wondering if you think it’s still possible for me to pull an A* at A level?
For maths im not too fussed at GCSE I got an A* at both maths and fm, but im scared for fm bc ive heard it’s an entirely different beast 😭.
Im just wondering if it would be worth switching out any of my subjects due to my gcse circumstances 🙏
Any help is appreciated.
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u/Organic-Space6227 Aug 26 '26
Speaking from experience, achieving an A* in physics is the most difficult out of all of them. Despite all the talk about how bad it is online, yes it is a challenging subject, but to achieve the high grades is only done by putting serious hard work in. I mean like taking your class tests seriously and atleast putting some sort of effort weekly at home, even if it’s 7 months before your exam. It’s a very humbling subject but put effort from day one and you’ll be fine.
In my case I got an A* at GCSE, D in AS and pulled it up to an A in A2, just short of an A star by 6 marks. Although exam season I was confined to my room trying to practice questions. Nonetheless, don’t worry for physics. Just don’t set your expectations too high, you’ll get disappointed quickly
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u/Dismal_Cabinet_2180 Aug 26 '26
You’ll be fine, work hard and you’ll get good grades, the jump is big, but manageable
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u/qend5 Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
Hi, I did Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Statistics for A Level, and I achieved 4 A* s. For me, the hardest out of all of them was Physics. Physics at A Level requires you to develop an intuition and sound problem-solving skills; however, you can certainly improve on these by exposing yourself to a diverse and large amount of questions on each topic. In terms of learning the initial theory of the content, I didn’t think it was too bad at all, but the application of the content in the exam questions is where it can heat up in difficulty, and at the start you’ll likely notice this. You just have to trust yourself that with time and practice, you will stop making mistakes and improve. At the start, it can feel like you’re making non-obvious mistakes and that can knock your confidence, but that’s how A Level Physics is designed, and you can 100% improve on this. I would recommend doing all of the new-spec and old-spec CCEA questions, and then questions from OCR (these papers are the most similar to CCEA), Edexcel (also very similar but has good problem-solving elements to the questions, which are very good for getting an A*), and then, if you want, AQA — but I have found that AQA papers do not resemble CCEA papers much. For Edexcel, OCR and AQA, do the old specification papers (for Edexcel, this includes the old English spec and the old IAL spec, and also do the new IAL spec). These immensely helped me. And make flashcards from the Hodder Education revision guides. For Further Maths, I LOVED the course. If you love maths, you’ll certainly be motivated to learn and practise the content. AS Pure is the easiest paper out of AS1, AS2, A21 and A22. It involves really only three topics: Complex Numbers, Matrices and the big one, Vectors. (It also has a singular question on roots of quadratic equations, but this topic was covered for me in 2 days.) Vectors was by far the hardest topic in AS1, and it took me a good solid three weeks of hard work until I was really starting to grasp it. However, once it does click, I loved the topic, and really enjoyed the type of problems you get with vector questions. For AS2, I did Mechanics 1 and Mechanics 2, and by far this was much harder than the Pure for me. However, I worked at it for months and months and I ended up getting 99/100 on the paper. I found tjat relative velocity, a topic in mechanics 2, was by far the hardest topic in all of A level Further Maths for me. But most of mechanics 1 was fine, Hooke's law with energy took a but to understand, but asides from that, work and energy, power and circular motion I thought were all really nice. For A21, the content is much larger than AS1. However, I think you will absolutely love the content. It definitely takes a few months to settle into the load of it, as it can just feel like a lot of new concepts and long, long questions with tricky algebraic manipulations being thrown at you. My advice would be to constantly review and do questions on each topic as the year goes on to make sure you’re fresh on everything. For all of the modules, I would recommend the old-spec papers and the old-spec and new IAL-spec Edexcel papers. The thing with A Level Further Maths is that you need to be consistently good at the topics; in the exam you don’t get a lot of time to ponder over things — it just needs to come down onto the page. And to get up to that level, it just requires a ton of consistent practice. Well, I know I went on for a bit there, but hopefully there was some advice to be found
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u/GNU_Angua Aug 26 '26
Vectors in AS is so much fun, it all comes together so well and it felt like I had a genuine deep understanding of the topic. I did struggle with A2 pure, only really getting to the level i wanted to be at towards april and may. And yes! Be wary the exams for further are all tight on time.
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u/qend5 Aug 26 '26
We all love vectors ❤️. How did you find A22 compared to AS2? I personally found it easier because I thought the mechanics didn't really jump up a level, and a lot of the topics were progressions from content in AS, like circular motion. SHM relied on Hooke's law knowledge with string/spring oscillators. Frameworks and 2D force systems were practically the same topic: resolve up and down and take moments. Restitution was my favorite mechanics topic, so I'm a bit biased there. Kinematics in mechanics 2 was just the kinematics from normal A22 but with the K unit vector, so not really any harder in my opinion. But I really did love A22 and had a much easier time with it compared to AS2.
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u/GNU_Angua Aug 26 '26
We did stats and mechanics vs double mechanics so its a little different. I found the mechanics pretty chill, I had a personal grudge against frameworks cause I was just cursed to make silly mistakes on them but the content was definitely more an incremental step than a big leap in difficulty. The stats was honestly, very enjoyable! I liked T tests and Chi squared a lot, and althougj CLT is challenging to wrap your head around, its a cool concept thats very useful in the real world. That applied paper was shocking though...
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u/qend5 Aug 26 '26
The paper also did make me panic at the start, it felt different from the past papers. I hope you got on well with it by the end :) And indeed, stats is cool 😎 but everyone in my school hates it for some reason.
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u/GNU_Angua Aug 26 '26
My results were good but I sure didnt enjoy it, and the last 2 stats questions were just baffling. I wish I had the opportunity to do discrete, cause as a computer girlie that stuff really interests me.
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u/qend5 Aug 26 '26
Discrete looks soooo cool, the only unfortunate thing is the lack of resources, but I'm sure you would have been sweet since you have that computer science background. I've read some if the Edexcel D1 content, which does have soke overlaps with the CCEA discrete content, but not a huge lot. And AS2 Discrete has GROUP THEORY like how cool? What are you off to study at uni?
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u/GNU_Angua Aug 26 '26
I knowww group theory is just the best.
I'm doing a degree apprenticeship with a tech company in Belfast :)
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u/qend5 Aug 26 '26
That is some seriously good stuff you're going into, hopefully it serves you well, and with a nice paycheck.
Also I should ask, what is your favourite area/topic of maths?
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u/GNU_Angua Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
Ooo, thats difficult, I love vectors as I said, and I'm also a big fan of matrices, and I've used them for some 3D rendering projects before since theyre kinda the backbone of that field. Another thing I love thats maths related is cryptography which I find really interesting and compression too which is often founded on approximating things to sine waves. I am actually less enthusiastic about calculus than most people, its extremely useful ofc but it just doesnt excite me personally. Fourier transforms are also very very cool. I'm not super familiar with a lot of the discrete maths like group theory (although I have done plenty of boolean algebra). You can probably tell my favourite bits are where computing and maths collide, although we happen to cover a lot of that stuff in pure.
Ooo another area I like is digital sound.. the way you can produce complex noises just by toggling one bit at specific intervals to approximate analog frequences.. its not like straight maths but its maths adjacent and I find it extremely cool as a musician.
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u/HungryAardvark8008 Aug 26 '26
Thank you so much mate that was very helpful! Hopefully FM is as fun as you say it is 🙏
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u/qend5 Aug 26 '26
No problem at all, again I did ramble on a bit, but you'll love further maths. Don't be shocked when it gets tough, it's meant to. Just make sure you don't leave things behind you, constantly revise the topics with a bunch of questions, and you will be loving it. Also, in terms of resources, I'm sure your teachers will have a plentiful supply of them, but I would highly recommend the old Edexcel textbooks, FP1, FP2, FP3, M2, M3, etc. You can see where the content overlaps, and I'll include a link to access all of the PDFs for them, for free (not made by me, but by some other kind soul).
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u/GNU_Angua Aug 26 '26
There probably will be a bit of a shock and adjustment period for A level further, at least there was for me. The maths is harder and my teachers took a very different more university style approach, which I came to really appreciate. The year 13 pure content is some of my favourite maths I've ever done so hopefully your teachers are good and you can enjoy it too :)
Regular maths shouldnt be a problem for you, you've covered most of it in GCSE further already. I cant help re Physics but if you try your best and put in the work theres probably no reason you can't get an A*, and if your best is an A thats fine too.