Exam time: ‘the harsh reality of A-levels’

Exam is a word that everyone dreads, and I can tell you some reasons why…

From that definitive moment when you finally leave secondary school and enter the mysterious year that is Year 12, you will be expected to mould into a mature student who will follow the correct road without a helping hand to push you in the right direction. But it’s not that easy to do. I’m not sure if anyone has invented a way for one person to do multiple things all at once but if they had I’d be the first person to find it. With the piles of paper (because, no, you do not get books provided for you from the teachers’ cupboard like that comforting GCSE time) mounting up to a point where you can never find that one piece that will very likely be the most important, you will feel the stress.

And then there’s revision. Oh how I hate it. The indecisive point you reach when you don’t know if you’re revising the correct thing or if what you’ve spent so much time on will actually be relevant. The feeling of anxiety over the fact that there’s no teacher to ask that burning question. It’s a painful experience but a rewarding one too. Year 11 was tiring, but year 12 is indescribable. I have to say that the hardest part is not understanding why something may seem easy, considering the fact that you must have been lectured almost 50 times about how huge the step from GCSE to AS level is! But really it’s not the step that’s massive, it’s the way you change as a person. If you know you want to do well then you will, and if you know you want to party then you’ll watch your grades plummet to an all-time low… Unfortunately that’s the harsh reality of A-levels.

If there was only one thing I could tell you, it would be to manage your time properly. You can still go out! It will make everything much worse if you turn into a revision zombie who stays at home every night surrounded by folders (and there’s another tip, buy folders!) because all your mind will become is a sponge, filled with an overload of knowledge that you can’t share with anyone. Don’t let that happen. Balancing time between friends, family and revision is something that everyone needs to do to ensure that they don’t disappear under a pile of AS notes.   

Starting early is also crucial but such a hard thing to do. From September I was already making revision notes, and if I hadn’t done that I most definitely would have run out of time. This means that you don’t really have time to settle into the new sixth form environment, but just remember that it only takes up two years of your life and even though they may be stressful, they will be over quickly and hopefully you will be able to look back at them with a smile. Something that really helped me with my GCSEs and AS year was the thought that I did not want to regret anything. I did not want to hold that brown envelope and think I could have done so much more, because at the end of it all it’s down to you to get to the place you want to be.