The Second Year's Comic

The second year's comic

Artist: qiandai_suian

Translator: undetaqted

[Reposted with permission]

rats of the future will avolve into a beast known as “A Lumpy” 

It's hard to be an adult

How I went from a C to an A* in A-Level Chemistry | Part 1

Part 1: tips + what I did + resources

These tips are for A-Level chemistry but can be used for any other course as well! A-Levels are generally considered tougher than AP exams, but in my experience are much easier than Indian boards such as CBSE, for example.

Before I get into the tips and what I actually did to improve, I would like to give a little bit of context about my situation, and why it might have been easy for me to pull my grade up so drastically. You can skip to the tips directly if you want! I’ve broken this down into three segments:

tips + what I did

resources

special tips for AS Practical (part 2!)

Some Context

I gave the CAIE examinations. I took the staged A-Level route, where you give your AS Levels papers and A Levels in separate, consecutive years. I received a C on my official transcript for AS-Level, to be precise. I changed my school right after AS-Level (11th grade) was complete, partly because of the grade I got (basically I didn’t trust my school enough haha). This gave me the opportunity to retake my exams – not sure if this is the equivalent of resitting the exam, as I had a special situation – as long as I would completely forgo my previous grade. So if I gave the exam again and got a grade even worse than the one I got in AS-Level, I couldn’t go back to the original grade. But this gave me a chance to start over completely.

I decided to give my exam in the February-March 2021 series (which is an India-only series), which fortunately didn’t get cancelled as it was before the second wave here in India, meaning there were no predictions and grade assignments based on coursework/school year performance (phew). Also, I have reason to believe the grade thresholds were lower in this series, as the board may have considered the effect of the pandemic, though the improvement is still significant. The switch to online school also meant that I saved commuting time, but that may have been cancelled out by the fact that I get tired by looking at screens for a long time, and that I spent an ungodly amount of time on Pinterest during my classes.

Tips + what I did

I don’t mean to be rude and ungrateful, but my teacher wasn’t exactly the best. So all these things only rely on you and not the teacher!

One thing I knew I did not do was put in enough effort into my studying, mostly because I was the best in my class even if I didn’t perform that well – I thought that’s just how good you can be in Chemistry. When I changed schools, my “best” was the average and there was this one guy who was just exceptionally smart, and that motivated me. So I decided to put in more effort and not give in to being lazy or saying “this is enough” for 3 hours of studying a day (not a competition, but I did around 6-8 hours for IGCSE, and that paid off really well).

Paid attention to my weakest points. For me, this was organic chemistry. I tend to be the person who goes on solving problems only on concepts which I know really well, which is obviously a problem since I couldn’t improve. I started making more notes, revising my notes, rewriting my notes in different formats (charts, mind maps, summaries, etc.) and really practiced my weakest points. This is especially useful if you, like me, have trouble remembering things with no logical backing, which is pretty much all of organic chemistry.

Practiced, practiced, and practiced even more. This helped me consolidate my weak areas and all the theory-heavy concepts (again, organic chemistry and parts of inorganic chemistry) and also realize what the most important topics/concepts were. Past papers (site linked below) were my must-have study technique. In almost every exam series, there was one question about the thermal stability and/or solubility of group 2 compounds – and after so many corrections I memorised it. This is a handy tool, as you know where to focus and which are the important questions; you don't need exact topic-wise content percentages to know what's important, in my opinion.

Corrected past papers not too long after I did them. This was immensely helpful, as I remembered my thought process while answering questions, as I could pinpoint exactly where I went wrong, and what part of my working I needed to change. For inorganic chemistry it wasn’t very helpful, but it was game-changing in organic and physical chemistry. Also, I added really detailed corrections, including points I missed (even though I had enough points to score full in that question), and some vocabulary corrections (key words matter!).

Used Multiple sources if I didn’t understand a concept. I didn’t rely on them too heavily, mostly only to consolidate concepts. Again, these will be linked in below.

Made a “corrections journal”. Basically, I wrote down all the things that I didn’t know, hadn’t come across before, or found important in this journal. This was especially helpful for MCQs, as writing helps me consolidate information, and in last-minute revising,

Picked up on + researched how to answer the questions. Remember how I mentioned vocabulary corrections? These, along with certain phrases that I found were common, I wrote down (or just remembered, this was natural). I also looked up sample papers and saw exactly where marks were awarded, in addition to knowing the mark scheme (which only comes with practice).

Did not repeat papers. Now, everyone is different, but I never repeat papers until I get a perfect score (I never got a perfect score). There is effect called the mere exposure effect which states that we prefer/perform better when we have already been exposed to something, even though we don’t consciously remember it. So my second attempt, even if it will be better, will not be a true representation of how I perform.

Resources

OpenStax Chemistry 2e for some physical and inorganic chemistry (especially coordination compounds/transition elements), though this book doesn’t have organic chemistry.

For my fellow Hindi-speakers, Physics Wallah and Vedantu NEET made EJEE are two of the best channels out there, especially if you understand better by learning the mechanism

This past papers site (better than PapaCambridge as there’s no funny little ribbon at the top right corner, especially for the later papers)

Khan Academy, the MCAT section has some good lectures on biomolecules

NCERT Chemistry for some Physical Chemistry questions

Hodder Chemistry and Cambridge Chemistry textbooks (these were the basics; I had to have both of them because I changed schools and I’m an analogue person) – the Cambridge one had a pdf for my syllabus, though I’m sure that there’s newer versions’ pdfs too, just look them up according to your syllabus/prescribed textbook

Be on the lookout for part 2, where I talk about tips for the AS Practical paper! This was my downfall, so I learned a lot.

Main: @nerdartsy

Photo by Orlova Maria on Unsplash

i don’t know what this is but yeah