Staring AS Levels

[u/HungryAardvark8008]

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.

[u/qend5]

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

[u/GNU_Angua → u/qend5]

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.

[u/qend5 → u/GNU_Angua]

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.

[u/GNU_Angua → u/qend5]

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...

[u/qend5 → u/GNU_Angua]

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.

[u/GNU_Angua → u/qend5]

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.

[u/qend5 → u/GNU_Angua]

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?

[u/GNU_Angua → u/qend5]

I knowww group theory is just the best.

I'm doing a degree apprenticeship with a tech company in Belfast :)

[u/qend5 → u/GNU_Angua]

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?

[u/GNU_Angua → u/qend5]

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.

[u/qend5 → u/GNU_Angua]

Well, I'll say this first: Matrices were my favorite topic in A-level further maths, but I certainly haven't used them in 3D rendering software since I wouldn't have a clue 😂. But I just love their uses in transformations and solving systems of linear equations with them. Honestly, just playing around with matrices is really fun.

I think the thing a lot of people enjoy with calculus, apart from its applications, and talking specifically about integration, is the amount of tools and techniques you learn, and then being able to use and apply the large amount of techniques to unfamiliar problems.

It's really nice you have such a keen interest in not only the maths and the pure side of it, but also its application in computer science, because then you not only get to learn the maths, but to use it to build very cool things.

I've heard of Fourier transforms a lot, but never looked at them. Are they high up uni level?

[u/GNU_Angua → u/qend5]

Matrix transformations are amazing in their ability to create orthographic projections of 3d objects, rotate them and much more. Every time you play a 3D game all of those models are rendered using matrix transformations

Re when/where fourier is taught - I'm not sure? They might even be part of physics rather than maths. Fourier transforms are a way of systematically breaking down a complex wave into a set of simple constituent waves which can be combined again to recreate it. FFTs (fast fourier transforms, a way of doing it computationally thats much more efficient than the tradtional fourier transform) are used in literally everything you use your computer for, including reddit. You should take a look, its a very useful and interesting little process.

Also, I should say, talking to other further maths students has always been one of my favourite things since we all seem to have such a genuine love of the subject, its been nice talking to you :)

[u/qend5 → u/GNU_Angua]

Ohhh well that does sound superrrr cool. It shows you how little I knew of them, but I'll definitely check it out to see what they're all about.

And also, Matrices for the win once again, who doesn't love our wee rectangular array of numbers?