All A*s at A-level

A-levels aren't a knowledge test. They're a pattern recognition test that uses your subject as the vocabulary. Once you actually internalise that, the whole approach changes.

There are only so many questions an exam board can ask. Past papers aren't “practice”, they're the actual exam, recycled with different numbers and slightly different framing. If you do enough of them, you stop being surprised. The variance collapses. That's the entire game.

So my method, end to end:

01. Forget revision notes for the most part. The textbook is the worst use of your time at this stage. Do past papers from day one, even if you can't answer a single question yet. The act of staring at the questions tells you what you actually need to learn.

02. Cross-reference everything against the mark scheme. The mark scheme is the source of truth. Not your teacher's notes, not the textbook, the mark scheme. What the examiner wants to see is what gets you the marks. The wording matters. Memorise the phrasings, not the “ideas”.

03. Anki for everything repetitive. Calculation patterns, mark scheme phrasings, definitions. I had decks for every recurring question type in A-level Chemistry. By the time the exam came round, the working felt automatic.

04. Use AI ruthlessly. This is the bit I want to underline, because I didn't have it and you do. Feed every past paper from the last fifteen years into a frontier model. Ask it to tag recurring question types, frequency, topic-by-topic mark distribution, and the exact mark scheme phrasings. You can build a personalised, probability-weighted question bank in an afternoon. Use it as a tutor that's available at 2am. Use it to explain things your teachers explain badly. Use it to mark your own essays against the rubric. The students who treat AI as a calculator for thinking are about to leave everyone else behind, and most of the Year 12s I've spoken to aren't close to using it properly.

Results, since people always ask:

Chemistry, around 100%, top of my school year. Biology, 85%, also top of my school year. Maths, 90%.

The thing nobody tells you is that you don't need to “understand everything”. You need to have seen every question type before. There's a real difference. Understanding is the luxury you afford yourself after you've nailed the exam. While you're prepping, your only job is pattern recognition.

Anki, past papers, mark schemes. Three tools, that's it. Anything beyond that is procrastination dressed up as study.

One last thing, because nobody who got their A-levels before 2024 will say this honestly. All A*s used to be a differentiator. In 2026 it is table stakes. The bar moved while you were sleeping. The students getting into the universities they actually want, the internships they actually want, the opportunities they actually want, are the ones who saw past the grades early and took some initiative. That could be learning to code, making something, running something, trading your own money, writing publicly, picking any direction that interests you and going further than anyone asked you to. A* in chemistry doesn't mean what it did ten years ago. A sixteen-year-old with real initiative does.

Get the grades efficiently. Then spend the time you saved on the compounding stuff. That's the actual play.