13th April 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of the main reasons students decide to request a tutor is when they find that the level of the work they’re doing has become harder, and they quickly feel lost. This is never more true than when a student moves from GCSEs to A Levels, or when leaving school and getting to university. Obviously ideally courses would be designed so that students never hit a wall which they can’t get over, but it is difficult to have an education system with a smooth learning curve all the way from when we start primary school until degree level.
Taking GCSEs as an example, the exams have become very formulaic, and although the government is taking steps to change this, it’s still possible to take ‘shortcuts’ to an A* at GCSE without deeply understanding the work. This would be fine is we all stopped studying aged 16, but these shortcuts leave students lost when making the step up to A Level. Our tutors often find that A Level students aren’t simply struggling with a few concepts now they’ve moved up to a higher level, the trouble is that actually the students can’t begin to tackle A Level material because they never fully understood the GCSE concepts upon which the A Level concepts are built. And of course, A Level exams better test this genuine understanding, so shortcuts are more difficult to find.
We find that sometimes, when a tutor teaches properly, it doesn’t increase a GCSE student’s grade as dramatically as they had hoped because the tutor isn’t helping the student to take shortcuts. These shortcuts may quickly improve the student’s grade, but it’s a short-term fix. However, once the student starts A Levels, the work with their tutor on understanding the underlying principles of the subject really help. People are often surprised that there are a large number of students who don’t excel at GCSE, but suddenly begin to at A Level, and then go on to be academics. This is all down to really understanding their subject and not looking for shortcuts.