The AS really helps with revision and exam practise.

We have always found that the AS encourages students to revise more thoroughly than they might do for mock exams at the end of year 12. We put a lot of focus onto exam technique, so overall, we think it’s going to produce better results for our students.

We enter all of our A level Biology students for the AS exams as it means they become more exposed to the exam questions – so the language, the style and the techniques needed for each question.

We are hoping that the AS will be beneficial to our students who have missed out on sitting a GCSE examination.

I am concerned about students missing out on mock exams rather than content. Our GCSE students would normally sit a mock exam at the end of the spring term and then we go through this with the mark scheme and how to model an exam answer. So students will not have gone through the same revision process that our previous students have done.

So, when we come back in September, we will be focussing on exam and revision practise.

The AS builds student confidence

We schedule two mock exams in year 12 and, using the exam papers from previous years, I teach exam technique and how to interpret the questions. So students have that confidence when they go into the exam room and they tend to be a lot more comfortable as they’re reading the questions.

We have just been discussing AS exams with our students and they all agree that the AS exam is a huge help going forward as they are a step up from the GCSEs and give them exposure to the skills needed for Paper 3.

The AS helps students apply their knowledge and learn more holistically

As well as building confidence, we find that preparing for the exam helps our students. We teach with mind mapping and recall activities but it is the discussion we have once we sit down and look at questions which really helps our students prepare for the assessment. As a teacher, I can see where the content is in the specification or what command word the data is pointing to, but without this exam practise, the students don’t quite see things along those lines.

So we spend this time trying to triangulate all of the learning and preparation with the specification, exam paper and the content through revision activities. It helps students to see that it is all holistic.