Trepidation

Time seems to be flying by at an extraordinary rate. I can still remember making each and every one of the below posts, and yet they nearly now span an entire year (albeit a sparsely-updated one). It seems bizarre that there remain only 8 days until I recieve the second set of results - the overall AS year grades - since the fateful 26th of August last year. Unfortunately, however, these are much more important.

Ultimately, these results might well decide the outcome of my university applications - as such, the prospect of recieving them is deeply concerning, to say the least.

Physics: My coursework for this subject was good (A grade) and the second exam was not terrible (although it transpired to my horror after leaving that I made several rather bumbling mistakes which were fortunately worth few marks). I was also pleased with the resit, in which I hope to gain a few more marks to hopefully push the grade up to an A.

Chemistry: This was definitely more difficult than Physics. While I obtained 94% in the original module, that really was a proverbial piece of cake in comparison to the summer examination. My coursework was again graded A, and I hope that this will offset the (probably B-grade, possibly A) performance in the most recent exam.

Computing: Preposterously easy examinations (8 marks for decoding some numbers...), but my coursework was, frankly, pretty shit. I'll be interested to see what I get here.

General Studies: What is there to say about this? You write stuff. I've no idea how well I did, but hopefully it'll meet the standards of the last two.

Maths: I've grown to enjoy this a lot. There's something fantastically satisfying about knowing how it works, even when a lot of the things that we do have moved from having practical relevance to being purely theoretical assessment. That having been said, I felt that my performance in the exams was mediocre - I missed two big-mark questions on the Core 2 exam (but seemed to be OK on the rest) while Core 1 went a bit better except for a silly differentiation question (that I would understand a lot better if it had been taught properly).

I left Maths until the end because there's a seperate rant coming on - time. Time is something that the exam boards seem to have a real problem with. From packing 11 exams into 4 days to forcing so much learning that the principles behind basic things can't be learnt, it would be nice if they actually broke out a calendar once in a while and evaluated things.

Consequently, I am probably the only person in my class who did some external reading and learned how differentiation (a mathematical technique) actually works, which is a great shame (especially because in principle it's quite simple). I might write a post about it soon if I get bored.