Using the Specification | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to our series and studying effectively for gcses and a levels in this video i will briefly mention the most important tool for helping you guide your revision and ensuring you've covered everything which is a specification so essentially this specification is a

document created by exam boards which tells teachers what to teach you each example covers slightly different topics and in different ways and your subject teachers decide which example they will be teaching from for example your physics teacher could be teaching from aqa whereas your history edexcel most exam boards are the same but there are small differences between topics content and the style of questions anyways the specification looks something like this and it's basically a long document which tells you everything about your subjects including the formats of the exams you will be setting so over here you can see uh for ocr a level chemistry they have three exams uh two of which are two hours and fifty minutes and a number is one hour 30 minutes and then there's a practical endorsement as well then for most of the document it just shows you uh the content that your teachers will be teaching you through your gcseo a level this is particularly useful as it helps you see where your learning fits into the rest of the course so it goes on about the content for a few dozen pages and then towards the end it talks about some of the learning objectives and a few other things to do with the course uh which isn't particularly important for most students of course you don't have to read the entire document the most important thing to look at is just a section on the content that you will be covering as it provides a framework for organizing your notes and your flashcards and everything else to do with revision now the specification for ocra level chemistry is fairly long but for something like aqa english literature the specification is fairly short and doesn't provide much value to you as a student it's more useful for teachers and in the case of english literature it just lists the options for texts that you can study and your teachers will have picked one

of these so now how do we go about finding the specification well the easiest way is for each subject ask your teacher what example you're doing and you may already know these facts because they may have told you before during the lesson but if you don't then just send them an email asking what example it is and after asking them you can search on google something like your exam board name followed by your subject and then just writing specification after that so for example my exam board is ocra a level chemistry specification so if i search that then it takes me to this page the first link and in the case of a level specifications you actually have two you have the as level specification and the a level one and the aes is basically all the content you will be covering in your first year and the a-level is and second year so everything inside the as specification is included in the a-level specification apart from a few things like exam formats and whatnot so you can just press the download a level specification and if you're not 100 sure this is your specification then you can just email your subject teachers asking them for a pdf copy of the specification and they can just give it to you because they are allowed to share with students and after finding a

specification what i like to do is download it and save it and then open up my downloads folder and from the downloads folder i upload it onto a google drive folder um so if i do that now then just rename it to the specification or whatever rename it to specification press enter and when i double click on this then you can see the specification is now loaded into uh google drive so the nice thing about this is that you can access it anywhere and on your phone if need to be otherwise like to print out the specification but since ink is expensive i don't really bother and besides the one time i did print out the specification i ended up just letting it accumulate dust on my shelf because i always started a digital specification and a feature i also like about google drive is a comments feature so if i highlight a section then i can just leave comments about it writing something like i don't understand this and then i can just come back to this point later on um or ask my teacher about it so basically reading through the specification is quite useful after craving something in class and each time you uh read a points from the specification you should ring a bell of something you've covered in class and if it doesn't then it's best to go back to your notes or your flashcards to make sure it's actually covered and if it still hasn't been covered it may be worth asking your teacher about it i usually tend to look at specification every week or two to check how we're progressing through the course because as your teacher teaches more of the course you should see that they're slowly covering the content in the same order as it's listed in the specification now the specification can be quite tricky to understand at times so what i find useful is copying a points from the specifications so say i don't understand what this points means and if i just paste it and search it then there's usually a website which mentions the same points so if i go to this first link then it tells me what this point from the specification actually means and then i can be like oh yeah i actually did a cover that in lesson i would just wasn't sure on the wording they used in the specification to describe that piece of content but if nothing comes up when you google it i would recommend asking a teacher about that specification point um in some kind of email or something and they'll usually explain to you what that actually means for your specification you can also find some documents which have links to the points in the specification to resources online for example this a-level uh playlist by jack brown he's made videos on everything from the specification for a level maps and it's all linked here so you can just uh read about it here and the reason you can do this is because for the new a level uh maps all exam boards have to do pretty much exactly the same content so if you're doing aqa maps then you will cover like 95 of the same content and so now it's doing excel maps for a level so this document is pretty useful because if you think you haven't learned something properly from a level maps then you can always check with this video and i'm sure there are many other documents like this and how bad that you can find after doing a bit of googling anyways

that's pretty much it for now we will be referring back to specification later videos especially when we're making notes and flashcards and organizing them according to specification but for now i'll see you next video