The Mistakes Year 12s Make (and how to avoid them)

A lot of year 12s make some really, really common mistakes that are applicable to all subjects, so I'm going to tell you the top five really quickly, and how to fix them. So just before we get started, my name is Mitchell, I have been teaching A levels for about 10 years now, and so these kind of problems come up very, very frequently, not just in maths by the way, it does apply to all the different subjects, but let's just jump straight into it. So the first one is not understanding the workload or routines. Now this isn't always the fault of the student because in some schools they treat A levels as like a beginner to university, which makes some amount of sense, where they expect the student to know the independent work that they need to do. A levels are very fast paced, and there's not much time to revise, and so as you're working, you're expected to do a certain amount of work to be able to solidify that learning. So here's just some information for you, you will have, depending on how long your lessons are, five to six hours of lessons per subject per week. So for example at my school they're 50 minute lessons, and we have six periods, so that's, you know, it's actually five hours, but five to six hours. What I would recommend as a very rough estimate is you should do three hours per subject per week independently as kind of a benchmark. So a lot of students will look at that and think that's actually a lot of, that's a lot of work, and some students will think that's not a lot of work, but it depends on what you're doing, which is another problem that a lot of students have, which is something I want to come on to in a second. But yeah, three hours per subject per week, bearing in mind that you do have free periods, depending on how many subjects you do, I would recommend using those free periods, every single one of them, to do work on those lessons, and that way you get most of this done at school, which is nice. Even if you have a half day, try working until school normally ends, even if you work from home, that's completely fine. So definitely make sure that you use those efficiently from day one. The next problem is that they treat year 12 like year 10, rather than year 11, because, you know, it kind of makes sense, you know, year 10, year 12, and then year 11, year 13 are the exam years, but you should keep in mind that there are exams at the end of year 12 that are extremely important. These are your end of year 12 mocks, or your UCAS mocks, which determine predicted grades. These are the grades that you use to apply for degree apprenticeships, or you apply for universities themselves. If you do not get good predicted grades, you can't apply to universities or degree apprenticeships, even if you get all A stars at the end of year 13. So in some ways, these year 12 exams are actually more important than the year 13 ones. The other thing to keep in mind is, if you get to the end of year 12, and you're getting like 50% or below, then year 13 is going to be exceptionally difficult for you, and you need to learn half of the year 12 content as well. Very hard. This is why I say you can't lock in in year 13, as it's just simply too late. You will not be able to get the top grades. Now, I'm sure that someone knows someone who had a generational lock-in, worked like nine hours a day or something, managed to get A's or A stars, but the point is the majority of people will not do that. So, if you start from the beginning of year 12, you will not have to worry about doing 12-hour days in year 13. This is why, and again this is why I said before, is students do the wrong thing when they study. Because you have exams at the end of year 12, you should be doing exam practice from day one. So literally, when you go to SIGFORM, which is probably going to be next Friday, well actually depends on when I upload this video, but whatever, it's going to be a Friday like the 4th of September, whatever you learn that day, then you're going to do the exam practice on Saturday. Now again, for those, some people say, oh how can I do exam papers if I don't know most of the content? Places like PMT for maths, biology, chemistry, physics and even computer science have exam questions by topic. So literally, if you go in day one, you're doing inequalities in regular maths, cool, you're going to go home and do every inequalities exam question. Okay, in the next lesson you do, I don't know, completing the square, you go home and do every completing the square question. That's what you should do. Making notes and things like that just isn't that useful. Even for things like chemistry, biology and physics, a lot of students really know the subject really, really well, but then they can't apply it to exam questions, which means there's no point, right? So you may as well do the exam practice from day one. Don't save papers until January, February, because there are so many papers to do, you will not run out. The next thing is a bit more ambiguous, which is sorting out issues early. So what do I mean by this? Well, specifically, you will have tests done regularly, I hope, depending on your school. You should take these seriously, you should actually treat them like exams, you should try studying and preparing for them, and use that grade as an indicator of what grade you're going to get at the end of the year. So if you're getting 50%, then you're probably going to get less than 50% in the end of your exam. If you're getting 90%, you're going to get less than 90%, but still close to it. If your scores are not good, figure out the issue and fix it. Now, I've got some of the most common issues, and again, this is going to get a little bit controversial, but the first one is a bad teacher. Now, bad teacher just means that the teacher isn't really working for you for whatever reason. Maybe they don't explain things in a way that makes sense to you, maybe they don't set enough work, maybe they just don't get along with you, or maybe they are just a bad teacher, who knows, right? Could be the wrong resources, so maybe you're using things that aren't really applicable to your example, they aren't very useful, this is where you need to... well, actually, I'll say that in a second, or maybe you struggle with time management. If you sort things out early, you can and will succeed, okay? But when I say early, I'm saying by December of year 12, at the latest, you should have a system that will work until year 13, the end of it. So a system that you're just going to do every single week, you're going to do the same thing again and again and again, and it will work. So the question is, how do you sort these out? Well, if you have a bad teacher or you're using the wrong resources, for example, these bottom two, if you have a good teacher, you can ask your teacher for that. But another thing you can do is obviously go to a tutor. A tutor can be very, very useful if you find a good one. I have a video on how to tell if a tutor is good or not. I also have tuition, if you want a book-free lesson, the link will be in the description and pinned comment. But getting a good tutor to explain things to you makes a massive difference. A lot of students wait until year 13 to get tuition, or their parents wait until year 13 to get tuition. It's just too late, and it's very, very difficult to work with these students to get them from a grade E to a grade A in like four months. The comparison I use is you do about 10 subjects at GCSE, you only do around three subjects at A-level. So each A-level is worth slightly more than three GCSEs. Is it possible to go from a U to an eight or a nine in three GCSEs in a few months? Not really, and A-levels are just harder. So sort it out early. You should, if you need tuition, you should be getting that in year 12. If you have, you know, sorting out your time management, in year 12. Wrong resources, in year 12, not year 13. Year 13 should be the time where you're just executing what you've already been doing. Now, with time management, again, keep things simple. Don't have anything complicated. So for example, note where your free periods are, and look at what subjects you've done before those free periods. So for example, let's say you have your maths lessons Monday and Tuesday. Tuesday, if you have a free period at the end of the day, you're going to do all the maths exam questions for whatever topic you've just done. And you'll do that every single week, bar none. Keep it nice and simple. The last one is, it kind of applies, because you're watching YouTube videos about A-levels, you're probably quite ambitious, and you're probably going to do quite well at A-levels anyway. But there's a danger of focusing way too much on supercurriculars. The first thing I want to point out is, your personal statement is really limited in terms of how much you can write. It's 3,000 characters, and it's split into three questions. You really can't write about five to ten different things. From what I've seen, and the advice that I give as well, for students that get into these top unis, pick two or three things, and that's it. And you're going to talk about those, and that's it. So if you've already got ideas for doing like ten different things, you have three different work experience placements, you're going to do maths olympiads, physics olympiads, you're going to do all of this, it's too much, you will not fit it in, and so there's no point in doing it. So instead, pick two things, ideally, so maybe a work experience, and then some kind of academic accomplishment, like an olympiad, or like whatever. But the last thing is, the grades matter more. I wrote kinda here, I'll explain it in a second. If you want to go to Oxford and Cambridge, and you're not getting three A stars, why are you doing more supercurriculars? Right, like if you get two A's and a B, you're not getting in, no matter what you've done as a supercurricular. So why have I written kinda? Well, with things like maths, and maybe computer science to an extent, there are extenuating circumstances. For example, there are people that get into the British Maths Olympiad, so top 100 in the whole country, and do really well. Obviously, those guys are going to probably get into Cambridge or Oxford for maths, even if their grades aren't good, but let's be real, they're going to be good. Likewise, with computer science or programming, something along those lines, if you have done something really, really, really impressive, then that can take precedent. But just so you know, when you apply through UCAS, if you don't have the minimum grades as your predicted grades, nine times out of ten, it's just deleted, like they just don't even care about it. So make sure your grades are good first, which is another reason why I said you need to make sure that you get this system in place early, because your supercurriculars are all going to be done in year 12, and the summer of year 12, because your application is sent in October. So, you know, you need to get this done early. So yeah, that brings me to the end of it. Again, I'll leave some links in the description for those of you that might find something interesting, whether you want a chat about A-levels, or you want a free diagnostic for A-levels to see how it's going, but I'll see you in the next one.