Is A Level Maths Actually Hard?

So I speak to a lot of students that are worried about taking A-Level Maths because they think that it's super hard. Whether they're Year 11s that have just finished, or if they're students going into Year 10 or are currently in Year 10. Whenever I ask them about A-Level Maths, they always look a bit scared. So I want to talk to you today about how difficult A-Level Maths is in a completely candid way. So the first things first, I think it's probably best if we just get to the numbers. So if you have a look at these numbers, they're pretty insane. So for Year 11, once you get a Grade 9, which is an A-Star, only 3.4% of people get that. For Grade 8 or 9, which is an A-Star overall, it's 10%. Whereas when you look at A-Level, 16% or 17%, it changes year on year, you get an A-Star. So that's a bigger proportion. And an A or an A-Star is around 41%. Now when you consider that the majority of university offers fall into A or A-Star, and you have two-fifths of students, close to half, getting an A or an A-Star, it does look like the subject itself isn't actually that difficult. But there is something I should mention here. There's two things actually. The first is this does include students that do Further Maths. And if you consider that around 100,000 people do A-Level Maths, around 10,000 people do Further Maths, that means 10% of those do have an advantage because of course, they're going to probably get an A or an A-Star if they're doing A-Level Further Maths, assuming they're not failing. And also, again with university offers, a B is luck. C, D, E, it just doesn't really happen at all unless you're going for a very specific course and it's to a lesser-known university. The majority of offers you're going to see are A or an A-Star. You will see some Bs, which is fine, but this is what you're looking at. And of course, this means that students work a lot harder to get those grades because they need them for university. And so there's a lot more pressure than at GCSE. So by the numbers, it seems that A-Level Maths could be considered easier in massive air quotes than GCSE Maths because a greater proportion of people get A-Stars. So the next thing I want to talk about is the actual content itself. Now, I'm going to stick to Year 12 because in Year 13, obviously, the content is different. But the vast majority of content that you cover in Year 12 is GCSE content, taking it a little bit deeper. If you've done GCSE Further Maths, it's basically entirely GCSE content. So I'm going to show you quickly the textbook. And if you want the link to this, I'll put it in. It's in the description of the video I made about not wasting your summer. So you're going to go find that there. But I'll be right back in two seconds. So here we have the pure Year 1 textbooks. This is the stuff you're covering in Year 12. And if you just have a look through it, I mean, look at this. Index laws, expanding brackets, factorising, indices, sets, all of that is GCSE content. If you've got a 7, this should all be fine because this is literally Grade 5 and 6. Solving quadratic equations, putting the square, quadratic. The discriminant is new, granted, but the rest of this chapter is all stuff from Year 11. Modelling, I don't consider it new because it's just using quadratic equations in context. I mean, it's super simple. All of these, literally everything here is also stuff you've done in GCSE. With the graphs, you would have done cubic, you haven't done quartic, you have done reciprocal. Points of intersection, translating and transforming, you've all done. Straight lines, you've literally done all of this except modelling technically, but again, it's not new. Circles, if you have done GCSE further maths, you've literally done this chapter. If you haven't, there's literally one new thing. Dividing algebraic fractions, you've done. Dividing polynomials, if you've done further maths, you have done it. If you haven't, then you haven't. Same with the next two parts. Proof, you have done before. Phenomenal expansion, again, if you've done further maths, you've done it. If not, this is new as well. This is the first new chapter and it's the 8th out of 14th chapter. Trig ratios, you've all done everything with it, literally the entire thing you've done. Trig identities and equations, again, if you have done further maths, then you've done this before. If you haven't, then you haven't. Vectors, you've done the majority of this before. Differentiation, again, further maths, yes. Regular, no. Integration and exponential logarithms. If we actually count up the number of new chapters, it's 1, 2, 3, and then I guess most of this, let's say 4, 5 new chapters out of 14. Around a third of the content is new or pure. Pretty good, right? Pretty, pretty good. The other thing you're going to be doing is, of course, because as you may or may not know, the A-level maths is split into two halves. Pure content, which is two-thirds of the content, and applied content, which is stats and mechanics, has one-third of the content as well. Again, if you look at this, sampling and all that stuff, you have done this before. This is all pretty new. This is stuff you've all done before. This is basically stuff you've done before. Probability, you've done before. These two, you haven't done before. Again, you're looking at three out of seven chapters that are new, so again, under half the content. Mechanics is almost entirely new. The only thing you would have done before is this chapter to an extent, with the distance time graphs and velocity time graphs, and maybe a bit of SUVAT, but other than that, yes, that's all brand new. In terms of content itself, you actually already know it. Now, in terms of the difficulty of the content, it depends on your teacher. When it comes to mechanics, some students find it the worst thing in the world. Some students find it the easiest thing in the world, and it's nothing to do with intelligence. It's based on how your teacher explains it, and the same is true for pure content as well. With pure content, the new stuff really is not difficult, and if you practice, you'll be fine, but again, it depends on the teacher. I know that explaining teachers is very common, but this is actually why I say to students to stick at the school that you're currently at for A-levels, because you know the teachers. You can gauge whether or not they're good or not afterwards. If you don't have a good teacher, then it might be time to look at getting tuition, because having someone explain stuff to you makes this whole process a thousand times easier. This brings me on to workload. Honestly, the workload is the exact same for all A-levels. I'm just going to put that out there. It's the same thing for all A-levels. Here's roughly what you get. So, you get around six hours of actual lessons per week. Now, this does depend on how your school actually does the lessons. For example, at my school, lessons are 50 minutes, and you get six of them, so it is actually technically just below six hours. I think it's like five hours and 40 minutes or something like that. Whatever, right? So, you have around six hours of actual lessons, and in terms of independent work, I always find it kind of difficult to give a number to a student, because with maths, it's really not about how many hours you put in, necessarily. A big catalyst to this, a way to amplify how useful those hours are, is about understanding and doing work that is difficult. An hour of difficult exam questions, where you focus on your understanding, is a lot better than three hours of doing textbook questions that you already kind of know. But, ballpark figure, the thing that gets recommended, the number that gets thrown around a lot is three to five hours of independent work. Now, depending on your school, some schools don't give sixth formers homework. Some teachers just don't give any homework at all, in which case you have to do three to five hours, and you have to figure it out yourself. Other schools, if you really have a solid teacher, three to five hours will be given as homework. So, in that case, all you have to do is do what your teacher says, and your life's pretty easy. Again, if your school is not giving out homework or whatever, or you feel like they're not giving enough, this might be time where tuition again is quite useful, because if you have a good A-level tutor, they should be telling you exactly what to do outside of the lesson. So, in the lesson, for an hour, it should be, okay, here's the understanding, I want to make sure you get it, and outside is the three to five hours of practice. This, again, as I mentioned, is very similar for all other subjects. Anyway, if you stick to this from the beginning, it's very easy. The common mistake I see students make is they lock in in year 13, but if you consider this, six hours plus five hours, that's 11 hours per week, and there's around 30 school weeks. So, if you wait until year 13, you're missing out on 400 hours of work, plus the 11 hours of work you have to do every single week for the subject in year 13. So, you can't wait until year 13. It's also like, I get tuition students in January of year 13, and they're in an E or a U, it's basically impossible to get them an A. So, you have to be really, really careful and get into that habit straight away from September to make your life easy. Overall, that's essentially how difficult A-level maths is. If I have to summarise it in a nutshell, it's not difficult if you have someone that can explain the concept to you well, so a good teacher or a tutor, and two, if you stick to the amount of work and get this work done every single week from the beginning. Do not miss it out. Even if you just wait until December of year 12 to lock in, that's hundreds and hundreds of hours of work that you somehow have to catch up on whilst doing 11 hours of work for this, and for your two or three other subjects. So, if you get started in September, your life will be fine, and A-level maths is really not that bad. Hopefully, when I showed you those different topics, it just really illustrates the fact that it is year 11 content. They just take it a little bit further, and they also expect mastery. So, for example, with like CERDs for instance, rationalising the denominator is not going to be a question in the exam. You're going to rationalise it as part of your answer. So, you have to have that real mastery over it in order to be able to actually do the questions. But I hope you found this a bit useful, and maybe reassuring if you're in year 10 to 11, and you're thinking of doing A-level maths, or you're a bit worried about it. It's not bad as long as you stick to doing your homework and listening in class.