How To Get An A* At A-level

How to get an A* at A-level

Getting an A* at A-level is difficult - only 10% of students achieve this grade each summer, however, with a lot of hard work and careful preparation this is an achievable goal.

There are 4 steps which will help you to achieve an A* at A-level.

100% understanding of the specification

An effective revision plan

Outstanding problem solving skills

Excellent exam technique

100% understanding of the specification
This means having no knowledge gaps or praying certain topics don t come up in the exam. Walking into an exam with gaps in your understanding is playing Russian roulette with your grades.

The starting point for this is having a complete set of notes that you have written yourself. This is why it is so important to produce revision resources on a weekly basis to cover all the content we do in class. At A-level the emphasis is on application of knowledge rather than knowledge recall, and you cannot test this by reading over facts. You will have already heard of active revision, this is especially important in chemistry where a minority of questions are straight forward recall and the majority test application of knowledge at varying levels of difficulty. Harder questions involve multi step procedures (calculations and mechanism) that need to be learnt and actively practised.

You need to test your ability to do this by actively working through practice questions on every topic.

A key priority is identifying gaps and fixing them as quickly as possible. This can be done by simply taking a copy of the specification and highlighting it using a simple traffic lights system. In practice this you would highlight any topics red on the specification which you need to prioritise in your revision plan and active practice.

If questions shed light on your understanding of a topic then you should update your notes (revision resources) to reflect this. Similarly if you find that some questions have a standard mark scheme answer that uses preferred keywords or phrases you should add these to your notes for future reference.

In summary:

Complete your revision resources every week

Use practice questions to actively practice the application of knowledge

Use the traffic light system to highlight the specification and identify priority areas

Add any understanding your gain from practice questions and mark schemes to your revision resources

Create an effective revision plan
The elements of an effective revision plan are:

Activities that help you remember facts

Activities that help you practice skills and calculations

A schedule based around daily goals

A system for tracking progress

Cornell note taking is an excellent system for taking and summarising notes, and for revising the factual content of the syllabus. More information on Cornell note taking can be found here.

You could use this system to make your revision resources or alternatively for making notes during classes.

Embedding information is best done through repeatedly doing tasks that use information, which means activities like exam-style questions or using revision aids like mind-maps and flash cards. Simply highlighting notes will not help you to learn the facts.

When putting together a revision plan you should ensure you devote adequate time to all the content you need to cover, and adequate time to addressing any weaknesses you have found when doing practice questions (see above section). The syllabus learning objectives give you a rough guide to how much time is needed for a given topic - but remember that some topics with fewer learning objectives may be harder to master than ones that appear to have lots to learn.

Rather than allocating time each day to whole subjects, it is better to break down your revision plan into achievable goals. Building your revision plan around SMART targets and keeping a record of the targets you achieve as well as things like marks scored on past papers is recommended. You can do this by crossing targets off your list or keeping a chart showing your marks - this way you have a visual record of your progress, helping you to stay motivated and empowered.

For example:

In summary:

Utilise the syllabus to allocate adequate time to topics

Utilise Cornell notes for summarising information

Complete exam-style activities

Creates and track SMART targets

Outstanding problem solving skills
If you re aiming for an A* you you need to be prepared for A* level questions. In exam-board speak these questions are discriminating questions, since they discriminate between top candidates.

Discriminating questions are usually one of the following:

Novel - you need to apply familiar concepts to unfamiliar contexts

Synoptic - these require you to see links between different areas of chemistry and connect different areas to develop a solution

Unusual - in terms of style or language. Occasionally you come across questions that are simply baffling, either because they are poorly worded or because the language makes no sense at all.

It should be noted that Paper 3 of the A-level chemistry course is almost entirely synoptic as it can draw questions from ANY of the content covered including any of the required practicals.

The need for problem solving and deductive reasoning skills is because you need to first categorise the type of problem you re facing, then select the correct approach, and finally execute the necessary steps to get the answer all without making mistakes.

How to improve your problem solving skills
It sounds obvious but the way to prepare for hard questions is by doing lots of them. You should seek out discriminating questions if you re aiming for an A*.

These can be identified by looking at examiners reports, by scanning for words like demanding , challenging , beyond the reach of most candidates or only the most successful candidates scored fully marks being used to describe questions.

If you find a question which on the examiners report states that only 10% of students achieved full marks, you want to do it because those will be the 10% that got A*s.

By doing lots of past papers you will naturally come across questions that are harder than others and will stick out as being different and harder from what you have already been doing.

It`s also recommended that you try past papers from different exam boards, this will take you out of your comfort zone and force you to see questions that test the same content in diverse ways. If you do every available question on, for example, acids and bases from AQA, you might be thrown if you then do one from OCR because you have become familiar with the style and difficulty of AQA questions. This familiarity may not necessarily be a good thing, because what if AQA decided to change the question styles for the exam?

Because of this you should exhaust AQA exam board past papers for the current specification first and then look at papers from other boards. Websites such as https://www.physicsandmathstutor.com/ cover exam style questions and past papers from a number of different exam boards.

In summary:

Practice hard questions

Use examiners reports and past papers to identify hard questions

Practice exam questions from other exam boards AFTER you have done as many of those available from AQA

Improving exam techniqueExcept for time management, improving the criteria above can be done by completing past papers so you have familiarity with mark scheme requirements and iron out common misconceptions.

To improve time management you will need to start doing questions in the time limit provided to begin with and then by doing full papers in the time limit. The time limit for A-level averages at around one minute per mark so aiming for one minute per mark will allow enough time to complete the paper and give you time to check back over your answers especially for harder questions.

After every question you complete you should do a post-mortem. If you lost marks, why? What do you need to do to ensure you don t drop similar marks in future?

Reading examiners reports also helps to improve your exam technique. Examiner reports often start with a sermon lamenting the number of things students did badly. Then they go on to a question by question analysis which highlights common mistakes, misconceptions and disallowed responses. Check examiner reports to make sure you don t make the same mistakes as previous students.

In summary:

Practise questions in the time limit (1 mark per minute)

Practise exam papers in the time limit (1 mark per minute with checking time)

Read the examiners reports

Important links -

AQA Specification

AQA Past papers examiner reports

OCR Past papers examiner reports

Edexcel Past papers