Why Year 11's Should NOT Study Ahead for A-levels | The A-level Trap

hey friends and welcome back to my channel my name's ray and i'm a first year cambridge student who just finished his exams last month and i thought i'd make a video on a comment and a dm i often get from year 11 students and they ask what is the best way of preparing for their a levels over the summer holidays and i imagine most of them expect me to say um buy textbook watch some youtube videos uh do some exam questions and whatnot and get ahead of everyone else but this is often the thing i discourage them from doing i found it quite difficult to explain my reasoning to year 11 students who wanted to get ahead and increase their chance of getting an a or an a star a level but that was until i recently read an article called the calculus trap which is linked down below and it helped me put into words what i'm now calling the a level trap

so you may hear stories about gcse students who raced through their gcses and already started preparing for their a levels or during the summer holidays they've learnt the first six eight or ten weeks of a level chemistry for example um and i've met a few of these students and i don't think they generally do better than the average student the student who didn't decide to prepare over the summer holidays i think the main reason for why they don't do any better is because rushing through the a-level curriculum doesn't develop their problem solving and critical thinking skills as much um to tackle the aea star level exam questions also rushing head means that when the lesson does come around for the topic they've seen before it often means they're not as engaged in the classroom and they're not thinking about the topic as deeply as other students who are seeing it for the first time and using the teacher to help them understand also i think it means that because they're not as engaged in the classroom by asking questions and whatnot because they've seen it before um then it's often quite difficult for the teacher to write them good references for university applications and apprenticeship applications because they don't really stand out in the sense of asking more questions and being engaged during the lesson because they've seen all these topics before so ultimately i think that gcse students shouldn't bother learning ahead for a levels in the traditional sense of getting a textbook and doing some questions from it and whatnot um i think there are better ways for them to increase their chance of getting an a or a star i can only speak for stem subjects because i did a levels in maths for maths physics and chemistry but i hope some humanities students can get some ideas of what to do so because our curriculum often focuses on teaching the general student and many tools to solve specific yet straightforward problems i don't think it helps the avid student who wants to get ahead and prepare for a levels um as much because um it doesn't give them a chance to develop on the tools they already have and apply them to more interesting problems because being able to do this means that your problem solving skills will improve and when you do come around to learning new tools such as calculus and a level then you'll be fast at picking up those new tools because you're already comfortable with the tools you already have and it'll make the whole process easier you may have experienced this if you've seen videos by channels such as mind your decisions in which he presents uh simple looking yet difficult problems which end up being solved using some simple maths or some clever geometry which you already know about but because you haven't developed your tools in your toolbox as much then the problems appear quite difficult so being able to develop on the tools you've learnt over the years by applying them to more complex problems will make picking up the new tools you learn at a level such as calculus much easier and it will help you solve more complicated problems in which you will encounter a level

so how exactly do you go about developing on the existing tools you have you may ask for stem subjects i'd say the most important thing to do is to do hard problems so you can either do hard problems which you found in your gcse exams or mock exams or any exams you haven't done for the subjects you want to take for a level or you can also find hard problems yet relevant problems from a number of websites online so for maths and physics you can find some good hard problems from websites such as isaac physics or the community the free community page on brilliant. org or from some old uk papers or the gcse physics olympiad papers so me recommending websites could end up being a whole video on its own so for now i've just left a bunch of links down in the description for websites i think that are good for developing the tools i've mentioned and of course you can also find websites on your own by doing a bit of googling so ultimately i think the skills you develop by tackling and thinking about and solving these hard problems will go a long way in making a level problems easy for you and even when it comes around to universities in later life because you'll have experience in tackling uh problems which seem quite difficult to do at first and then breaking it down and whatnot and if you decide to apply for a competitive universities such as oxford and cambridge then it will make the process of studying for the admissions assessments easier because you'll have more experience in thinking about and solving hard problems

but i think there are a few things keep in mind when doing these difficult problems uh you should give each problem enough thoughts and make sure you understand what is going on in the problem um and if you get stuck then take a break but you should not look at the solution too soon like if you get stuck um you shouldn't go straight away and look at the solution because it won't use any further because you'll just end up learning specific solutions to specific problems so i think you can gain the most out of your time by doing problems which are just slightly outside your comfort zone because as you improve and as your skills get better you'll realize your comfort zone begins to increase and problems you thought were really difficult before end up becoming easier to do and you realize that problem wasn't as bad as you once for because your skills have improved and you've learned to apply the tools you've developed over the years in more unfamiliar circumstances which goes back to when you learn new tools at a level then learning those new tools will often be easier and you can use that to tackle more complicated problems also i think it doesn't make sense to do what some other people do in which they sit down and do like 20 problems all on the same topic um i think it's better to mix it up a bit and do problems from a bunch of different topics but i can make a whole separate video about problem solving so i'll leave that there for now so i think many students get stuck in this a level trap because they don't realize there are better on alternative ways of them increasing their chance of getting an a or a star ultimately i think it's a good idea to keep your mind sharp during the holidays and doing a bunch of difficult problems is a great way of keeping your mind

sharp also if you're interested in doing stem at university or in later life then i would suggest it's a good idea to either learn programming by using channels such as free code camp or using various websites and if you already know programming then i would suggest it's a good idea to also develop on those skills by doing some interesting problems on websites such as project euler or by um working on some of your own personal projects such as making a discord bot for you and your friends or making websites and

whatnot and once you get around to learning a levels from september you'll actually have to sit down and learn concepts and remember certain content and facts and whatnot and you won't be able to rely solely on problem solving skills so for that i recommend watching my uh video series and how i got an a starting maps for maths physics and chemistry which should be linked somewhere right now

now but that's it for now thanks for watching my short video if you found anything useful then leave a like and subscribe and if you agree or disagree with anything i mentioned in the video then leave a comment down below but anyway i'll see you next time