What I learned helping my teen revise for A Level subjects: practical parenting tips
The bowl of half-eaten beans on toast had been congealing on our kitchen table for two and a half hours when my 17-year-old, Joe, pushed his A Level chemistry textbook away and stared at the ceiling. “I’m so sick of this,” he said. “I don’t even know why I’m memorizing all these bonding angles for a subject I don’t need.”
Joe sits three A Levels: biology, chemistry, and maths. Back when he picked them in year 11, he thought he wanted to study pharmacy. By the end of lower sixth, he’d changed his mind, and decided he wanted to study physiotherapy instead. All the physiotherapy courses he’d applied to only required two good A Levels: a B in biology and a B in any other science. His third A Level, maths, only needed a passing grade – an E or better, at every single university he’d applied to.
I’d known that, of course. But I’d been raised on the idea that you work as hard as you can at everything, so I’d been nagging him for months to split his revision time equally across all three subjects. “You never know what might happen,” I’d say every time he complained about maths taking time from biology. “A higher grade can only help.”
That Tuesday night, though, he’d just had his second panic attack in two weeks after a set of mocks. He’d scored a D in his latest maths mock, which was already well above the E he needed, and he was still beating himself up for not getting a B. The kettle clicked off behind me, and I realized I’d been repeating a rule that didn’t actually apply to his situation.
We pulled his laptop out to the table, pulled up the entry requirements for all five of his university choices, and wrote them down on a scrap of paper next to his revision timetable. It was right there, plain as day: biology, minimum B; chemistry, minimum B; maths, pass only. I’d helped him fill out the applications myself, but I’d never actually processed what that meant for his revision.
For years, I’d bought into the idea that revising for A Levels means covering every topic, doing every past paper, and aiming for the highest possible grade in every subject you take. That’s what schools talk about in parent information evenings, that’s what all the revision guides push, and that’s what I did when I took my A Levels 25 years ago. No one ever talks about adjusting your revision to what you actually need, instead of some generic idea of success.
We rewrote his timetable that night. Instead of three hours a week for each subject, we shifted it to five hours for biology, four hours for chemistry, and one and a half hours for maths. That was the first change. Next, we got specific about what he actually needed to cover in maths. I emailed his maths teacher to explain the situation, expecting her to tell us we were being lazy and cutting corners. Instead, she wrote back an hour later saying she sees this all the time, and attached a one-page list of the 12 core topics that come up every year in the first half of the exam, which was all he needed to get the 40% he required for a pass. She even said he could skip the entire second half of the syllabus for the purposes of revision, because he only needed enough marks to pass.
That was the second concrete change: for the subject that only needed a pass, we cut out all the extra work. He didn’t bother memorizing the hardest topics that only come up once every three or four exams. He didn’t do every past paper from the last ten years – he only did three, just to practice getting the 40 marks he needed. He stopped aiming for a B or even a C, he just aimed for the lowest grade he needed, and that took so much pressure off.
The third shift was small but made a huge difference: we stopped talking about “needing to do better” in the lower-priority subject. If he came home from a revision session saying he didn’t get much done in maths, I didn’t nag him. I just asked how biology went, because that’s what matters.
It’s been six weeks since we rewrote that timetable, and the change has been noticeable. Joe still gets stressed about exams – I don’t think any 17-year-old going into A Levels doesn’t – but he hasn’t had another panic attack. He’s had time to go over the tricky cell biology topics in biology three times instead of once, and his last mock grade went from a B to an A, which is way more than any university asks for. Last weekend, he even had time to go to a football match with his friends, something he hadn’t done since Christmas, because he wasn’t spending three extra hours a week cramming for a grade he didn’t need.
I still talk to other parents at the school gate who are shocked when I tell them what we’re doing. “Isn’t that risky?” they say. “What if he fails?” But the odds of him getting below an E when he’s already getting Ds are tiny, and even if he does, most unis will still accept him if he meets the grades for the two subjects that matter. We’ve talked about that with Joe, and he’s fine with the risk. He’d rather have a strong grade in biology than a wasted strong grade in maths that no one cares about.
The thing no one tells you about revising for A Level subjects is that it doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all. You don’t have to push your teen to get the highest possible grade in everything they take. It’s okay to revise for the outcome they actually want, not the outcome everyone else says they should want.
Exams start in four weeks, and we still have bad days. Some nights Joe will procrastinate for hours, some nights he’ll get worked up about not doing enough. But right now, this system is working for him. We’ll see how it goes when the results come out in August, but I can’t say I regret it. Burnout before the exams that matter is a far bigger risk than a slightly lower grade in a subject no one asked for.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I learned helping my teen revise for A Level subjects: practical parenting tips