Welcome to the first part of Right Track’s guide to GCSE Success. In this initial post we will be providing insightful and practical advice on choosing GCSE options for year 10 through a 6-step guide. Our later posts will cover revision tips, preparing for exams and how to manage coursework. We welcome students, parents/guardians, teachers and all whom are interested in GCSE success to read and share our post… Lets get started!
A little bit of background…
In case you didn’t know… ‘GCSE’ stand for ‘General Certificate of Secondary Education’. They are qualifications awarded by five different examining bodies – (AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC and CCEA) to KS4 students in year 11 for the subjects they have been examined on. Almost every student in England and Wales will sit GCSES and those that do will have to sit three compulsory subjects – Maths, English and Science. Students can expect to be assessed for at least 9 subjects for their GCSES (students may sit more or even less). The remaining subjects will be a combination of optional subjects chosen by the student (usually two or three subjects) and other mandatory subjects which will vary across different schools.
So what are GCSES actually used for?
GCSE’s are used for quite a few things believe it or not! Let’s list them:
1) They give students an opportunity to study a range of subjects and discover their interests.
2) They are used to determine which college/sixth form students will go to.
- Some colleges/sixth forms will use GCSE results as a basis for admitting students. Since GCSE’s can be used as predictive grades more selective colleges/sixth forms will use these grades to determine if they will admit students into their college/sixth form.
3) GCSE performance can have knock-on effects on further education, higher education and career choices.
- Many colleges/sixth forms will have requirements for permitting students to study certain subjects at A-Level (or equivalent) (e.g. at least a 6/7 if you want to do Chemistry).
- Your A-level (or equivalent) choice can also guides your higher education choices. For example, if you want to study medicine at university to become a doctor you will need certain A-Levels such as chemistry – so if you don’t quite get the GCSE grade in chemistry to do chemistry at A-Level that may have a knock-on effect on your further education and career choice. (Remember, all is not lost if students do not get certain grades, there alternate pathways students can take to reach their goals (e.g. through resits and/or alternative courses)
4) Required by some higher education institutions.
A lot of higher education institutions (e.g. universities) actually specify that they require certain GCSE grades as well as A-level (or equivalent) grades for certain courses.
Whew! Now that we’ve got all of that out of the way, let’s get into some useful tips on selecting GCSE options.
Right-Track's 6-Step Guide to Choosing your GCSE options.
A lot of students will have an idea about the subjects they’re interested in but not a lot know exactly what they will be doing, the content they will be learning and the impact their GCSE choices can have. The key to choosing the best subject for each student, is all about finding a balance between these factors as well as knowing what their strengths are and what they like.
STEP 1: Make a list of your top 5 GCSE options.
- We recommend choosing your top five options (even if you only have one or two options), so you can compare and choose the best one for you once you have completed the steps below!
- These can be based on something you’ve always been interested in, something you want to learn more about, subjects that you think you will enjoy and/or be good at.
- Also consider further studies, if you want to study a certain subject in college/sixth form there may be GCSE requirements for that. Additionally, if you want to study a certain university course then studying for it at GCSE can put you in a better position as you are familiar with it from an earlier stage.
STEP 2: For each of your top 5, find out what examination board your school uses for these subjects.
- This should be on your school website/prospectus or you can just ask your teachers in school. Write down the examination board next to each subject in your list.
STEP 3: For each of your top 5 subjects read through exactly what the subject involves for GCSE.
- Content and assessments vary between examination boards, so this is a way for you to get better informed about the subject if you were to select it.
- For example, AQA history has two written exams but Edexcel and OCR history have three written exams (at the time of writing). So, if you your school is on Edexcel history and sitting a lot of exams is a big factor for you, you may considering choosing another subject which may not be as exam intensive and which you still like.
Have you ever heard someone say ‘if it wasn’t for that exam I definitely would have done better’ or ‘why do I have to do so many exams!?’ the likelihood is that they didn’t take these steps as they probably would have made better subject choices for themselves. In general, these are the things to consider:
- How many exams will the subject have?
- Will this subject have coursework? What will the coursework involve?
- What will the content cover and what aspects of the subject will I be learning? Will I find the content in another subject more interesting?
STEP 4: Summarise the key information for your top 5
- After reading through the specification and making notes on each subject you want to summarise the key information for each subject in helping you make your choice. All of this information will be on the examination board website for the subject in the ‘specification/qualification at a glance’ section so you can simply summarise the information from there.
STEP 5: Consider what are your strengths and what do you like?
- Now, from your list you need to consider what your strengths are and what do you like?
For example, lets say you want to choose a language for GCSE:
- You may really like the idea of studying another language but you not like the prospect of sitting a range of different assessments as you feel this may be something you may be weak at. GCSE languages typically involve a range of assessments (reading, listening, writing and speaking) so you may opt for something else you like which has less assessments but that you still like.
- Or you may already be able to speak Spanish and even though you don’t like assessments that much, you have such a great strength in the subject already that you’ll grind through the assessments!
This is a personal exercise where you must find the balance between your strengths and likes to determine where you rank that subject in your list of options.
STEP 6: Choose your options!
- Select your options from the list. You may find that the options your originally thought you were going to do have changed now that you’ve found out some more information about the subjects. Which is the whole point of the exercise!
We hope you found our 6-step guide to choosing your GCSE options useful!
If you have any questions or would like some more guidance on this, feel free to email us at contactus@righttrackservices.co.uk.
All the best and stay tuned for our next post!
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