How I Got an A* in Chemistry A-level (Cambridge Student)

hey everyone welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is ray and i just finished doing my second new physics here in cambridge and in the summer of 2019 i achieved an a star in a level chemistry now in this video i'm going to be going over how i achieve that star like my workflow any resources i used any tips i have for how you can also achieve an a star so do check out the timestamps in the description and in between the video and also in case you're interested i did ocra for a level chemistry and if you're doing that board as well then more of this advice will be applicable to you if not then hopefully you can still take away most of the advice and apply to your own board so

i'll quickly outline my a-level workflow which i've explained in more detail in an a-level workflow video which will be linked above right now but basically it consisted of first getting the specification and downloading it from the official ocr website in my case but it depends on your exam board and then keep it in google drive and because in google drive i could annotate and highlight any pods which i wanted without having to print it out and i used that to make sure i was going for the course at the right pace when the teacher was teaching it then in class i would go and learn the content itself and make notes during lesson and on the weekends after finishing any major topics or like a large chunk of this topic i'll turn these class notes into flashcards whilst using some online chemistry related resources which i will mention later in the video um more detail how i do this uh is in a video called learning new content which should be linked above right now where i go for your works example anyways i would put all those flash cards onto digital flash card app called anki and i would go through the flashcards every day because digital flashcards are so much better than normal flashcards physical flashcards because they actually tell you when you should be going over that flashcard depending on how well you're getting it right or wrong i also have a video on how you can use anki in case you don't know which should be linked with right now too and then i would do practice questions consistently from the year after having learnt a topic and that would usually be for you the homework the teacher was sending us but in some cases i would also think to myself oh it's been a long time since i went over this challenging topic let me make sure i still know it so i would find some practice questions online like from websites like physics and maths tutor which i'll talk about later and then basically go through the questions and any questions which i didn't entirely understand or couldn't get i would go and ask my teachers about and about two to three months before my exams i would start doing past papers now i started off doing the old specification past papers both the as and a2 papers for my a2 exams and when i was preparing for my as final exams uh at the end of year 12 i would do like a bunch of as past papers as well and i'll keep track of them on my past paper tracker and i start off with the old specification papers because 80 to 90 of the content is similar to the new spec and it allowed me to make sure i actually had the wording right and i knew all the keywords and then i would move on to the new specification papers and that meant i couldn't make the most of the new specification papers and focus more on the analytical problem-solving side because i knew i had the content nailed down and in between doing these papers i'd also add on some mistakes by which i had and with that file i would go through it regularly and even before my mock exams or doing more practice tests at home i'd remind myself of the mistakes i frequently make and that would like remind me what to look out for in the actual exam as well because i would slowly develop a habit of looking out for these mistakes which i just have a habit of making so that was a brief overview of my workflow for a a-level chemistry as for a few resources which i

found to be really useful for helping me learn the content the first of which was youtube because like if you don't understand your teachers then often you can find someone on youtube explaining it much better than your teachers can or if your teachers are going a bit too fast then you can find videos which sort of explain in a different way or explain it slowly and you can also like rewind the video as many times as you like and stuff so a few channels which i particularly liked the first of which being allergy chemistry which i have here right now and if you go to playlists then you can find um like his playlist on a bunch of aes and a2 content and he's also has some shorter revision videos so like ocr a year two revision and like that just goes for a bunch of material as well i mainly stuck to the generic whiteboard tutorials and i also quite enjoyed my chem guy so he is more specifically related to ocr if you do that so if i go to playlists again then you can see a bunch of his playlists and i just sort of watch a bunch of videos through the playlists and especially some of the walkthrough videos where he walks through some exam questions i found to be particularly useful uh but if you want something which is more aqa specific because you do aqa chemistry then i heard this as a good channel and you can also go to playlist and find some of the structure um of everything here but more generally if you want to find something which is more specific to your board then you can just basically search like ocra chemistry a level or whatever your borders say it's like at excel or like uh i don't know whichever boards and whatever boards are out of there but if you just search that didn't you can find a bunch of channels related to it now it can be easy to like find three four or five different channels and like just watch all of the videos by then but you get to a point where it's just not worth it so i'd usually stick to like one or two channels um and i would only watch those channels so for me that was my chem guy and allery chemistry and if i didn't understand like one particular video then i would uh watch another video by like allergy chemistry if i didn't send my chem guy and vice versa and also for when i understand the content quite well in class and i just wanted to make sure there was a different explanation would be a bit which better then i would still go in the video and watch it like two or three times speed uh and that would be really useful for sort of like helping me skim through the information on the video quite quickly as for our

resources i also liked cameravise because they had some really good concise revision guides for chemistry and i would only use those after i understood the material through lessons and watching videos online because otherwise revision guides just don't make much sense so on this website you can see they have the ocr revision guides you can also find them for some motherboards as well and i'll just go on one of these revision guides and then i would cross check all my notes before turning them into flashcards to make sure i had everything included um and they were like pretty concise and it was just useful for checking as well and often i would find like explanations here which i preferred or there would be some good diagrams which i wanted to include in my notes in which case i would use the snipping tool by pressing like windows shift and s i don't know what it is for mac and then i'll just like snip one of these and then it would come up and now the next resource is

chem guide so this has a bunch of information on which goes uh well beyond the a level as well but it's particularly useful for helping you understand some like really basic concepts or like if you're not satisfied with your understanding of something in class and you can't get a satisfactory understanding from like watching youtube videos or even the revision guide then like just reading a few of the pages on here can be particularly useful if you find the right page or if you just search google search like chem guide and then followed by the topic name you can find something on chem guide because when reading through some of this information it explains it really well and it has some really good diagrams as a lot of notes about like how this may technically not be right at university level you learn something different don't be afraid if you like don't understand all of it i didn't when i was using it and don't feel a temptation to like read every single page because i had that temptation and it's just not really too useful it's useful for understanding concepts which you're very unhappy about you're understanding with and then you want to improve your understanding or if you particularly enjoy chemistry and you want to take your understanding a bit further next up

was the cg provision guide so you can see i have the online version right here and you can see like um the russian kind can be quite information dense and like i said for revision guides you have to make sure you understand the material first and you've learned the content either through class or if you're watching youtube videos if you jump straight to revision guide then you'll be you're barely going to get any value out of it because it just won't make as much sense to you because the whole point is it's a revision guide so it's meant to help you revise the information not help you learn the information for the first time but yeah this will also be a good place to like screenshot any diagrams to include my notes and flashcards because i had the digital version and next up is

a textbook so i don't have it with me right now because i return it back to the screw library when i finish my a-levels but whichever textbook your teacher recommends uh for your exam board then like the end of chapter questions can be pretty useful for that as for the learning the content from the textbook itself i didn't find it too useful because it sometimes went on or waffled on or like um it just gave useless information and i found the videos to be much better in helping me understand material for the first time generally i think that many a-level textbooks can be quite poor or bad so if you don't understand the material from the textbook then don't feel bad it's like usually because a textbook explanation isn't good enough and not anything to do with your own ability because like sometimes i just wouldn't unsend textbook and i think it would be my fault but usually it's the textbook's

fault and except for finding like practice questions which i could attempt there was physics and maths tutor so if i go to like the a level section and go to like chemistry revision then i can find chemistry a levels from 2015 and if i go to my a level ocra then i can see how it's split by papers so i can go to like module free and then i can find like a bunch of questions on this so i can find like empty changes question paper uh and then the mock scheme as well so then i can print this off and attempt the questions myself and then after that i can go to the mock team and like mark the questions as well and basically make notes on anything i was getting wrong and add that onto a mistakes file which i mentioned earlier so using the topic test from physical map tutor as well as new homework i was given was high practices topics throughout the year and made sure i was comfortable especially with the topics i found this to be the most difficult so

now i'll go into a few tips for a lot of chemistry the first of which is to use the keywords now this is something i really struggled with to begin with and i kept dropping marks as a result just because i wasn't using the right keywords i was kind of giving a hand wavy explanation and using the right keywords gives like the examiner or your teacher no doubt about whether to actually give you the mark because like you use a keyword in the mock scheme and this uh came from doing more practice questions because and marking them yourself you slowly pick up on the keywords that the examiners are looking for and even if you come across a new question you more or less have a sense of like what keywords you should be using for this specific topic and i would also add these keywords onto my flashcards when i was going through them and be like oh this is like a keyword that i have to be using so i'd usually like make it bold or like putting capture letters so it's learning the keywords with those topics as well in some cases it doesn't matter too much if you're not using the keywords as long as your understanding is like kind of right and the examiner can see it but using the keywords basically gives them no doubt about whether to give you the more so i'd highly recommend learning them so my

next tip is to be specific in the answers and this is something i struggled with initially as well i just wasn't specific enough so in some cases where you have like temperature rises or something rather than saying a vague generic statement like one has a large attempt to rise in the other write something more specific like uh like substance a or like bka's temperature rise is double that of because b's if it's pretty easy for you to figure out that like it's double in this case or like when comparing molecules and you're comparing like bond strengths or something or saying that one forms more bonds than the other if it forms like twice as many bonds and it's pretty obvious for you to work out that's twice as many bonds then just write twice as many or and write the names on the molecules instead and this can be something particularly easy to like trip upon or just not do but it can be very important when it comes to like marking so whilst you can understand concepts really well if you miss like small details of saying like oh the temperature rises double or something then you won't get the market because you weren't specific enough in the

answer so my next tip is to make sure you know the organic pathways so i started learning the organic pathways about two to three months before my exams like in real detail and knowing like how to get from one molecule to the other or like these intermediary molecules as well and i did this by going on google and searching like ocra a level chemistry organic pathways so if i just search that then i can find a document by ocr and you can see it has organic pathways right here and then there is the aromatic organic pathways and for phenols as well and then there's a blank conversion as well for all of them so you can just go through the blank version and try to fill it out yourself and then check against the actual version to make sure like you have the right conditions and stuff and i'd go through this daily about like uh once two months before my exams or more or less every day and you can just find the organic pathways for your board as well just by searching your board name then organic pathways or you can even find it for the as level because these are all uh two years of reactions and you will have a smaller subset for like the as exams also do try

to really understand what's going on in the calculations in a level chemistry because they can be some easy marks but they can also throw in a curveball and try to trip you up if you don't understand it too well and this can be especially important if you're not taking a level maps so an example i kind of use is like the first time i learned about hesse cycles and hess's law and stuff it was a bit confusing for me and sometimes i would just end up getting the calculations wrong but i made an effort to like understand their reasoning behind and then once again the reasoning behind it and everything then i can basically solve like any hesitant questions um so like make sure you understand the calculations especially if they like if foreign a small detail then you can account for that because you've actually understood it and you're not like running some algorithm or like repeating some kind of robotic procedure or something when doing the calculations so my next tip is

to not get too caught up in the practical drive yet so i was really worried about my practicals and i thought i had to be paying like 100 attention during each practice call and memorizing all the small details and stuff like that in case it comes up on the exam and that's really not the case especially for ocr chemistry um because like why would they ask about that you're already learning their content in class anyway and the practicals are just a chance for you to apply the content in your learning class now the thing i focused on more in practicals was not so much about the content on practical stuff i'm about the skills i was developing and like the generic things that you'd be on the lookout for or like just practical skills in general so like being able to do titrations is a practical skill and you can gain some marking points by like answering a question about titrations and also keywords do titrations like looking at the bottom of the meniscus you don't have to make flashcards on like every practical you've done and try to learn all the details focus more on the skills you're developing during these practicals and then practice a few practical based questions as well which you can find online or you can do free past papers so like the ocr a-level chemistry like i think paper-free had most impressive related questions where you got a chance to apply the content you were learning to like new practice which you had never seen before so that's mostly for the

video as for some like concluding advice or something like i personally found a level chemistry to be the hardest subject for me just because of like how specific i had to be and i had to like pay attention to a lot of details and stuff and whilst i thought i understood their content or material well enough sometimes i just wouldn't get the marks and questions because of those two reasons now don't worry initially that if you get a bad results in the other chemistry or like for your first few topics test i think like for my first one i probably got a c or something i just remember not doing particularly well and i thought okay well this is the foundations in chemistry topic test like if i'm not doing well then what chance do i have a level chemistry and then i ended up being like one of the only two people in my school to get an aston a-level chemistry after getting like a c or something in the first topic test so do be consistent do put in the hours and do like work smart as well as work hard and a-level chemistry can be quite fun and enjoyable if you're like willing to sort of enjoy the process and not tell yourself that's super difficult um because the more times you tell yourself something is difficult the more likely you are to give up and the less enjoy it so if you want to learn a bit more about my whole revision process then i do have a series called studying effectively for gcse's a-levels which should be linked somewhere right now uh but that's basically for the video i guess i'll see you next time bye