I still remember my first day of secondary school. I joined and it was an unfamiliar environment. I felt lost and scared.
And the worst part of it all was that I had to start learning subjects that I didn't even know existed. And everything was just so, so overwhelming. In primary school, the only subjects that I had learned were maths, English, and topic, which was a combination of like history, geography, and like all the other humanities.
And by the end of like the sixth primary school years, I had barely just learned how to speak English to like a conversation level. That was good. Let's keep it here.
And now I was told that I had to take 11 subjects for GCSEs. Maths, English, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, French, History, Latin, Music and Additional Maths. It was tough and there were highs and lows.
But before I knew it, my secondary school chapter of my life was over. and all that was left was an envelope. And in that envelope was a set of perfect grades. The grades for GCSEs get distributed by a bell curve like this, with a grade 9 being at like the far end of the bell curve right here. And they did this for every single subject 11 times.
The same subjects that I didn't even know existed at the start of secondary school. And I don't say this to brag, because by no means was I special. I know people who got better results than me, and then by no means was I gifted either.
I still believe that anyone can do it. But there is something that is worthy of praise in all of this. And it's the fact that I got these results while still posting twice a week on YouTube. And making videos is a lot tougher than you might think.
I still went to the gym on most days. I did it while I still played sports. Kickboxing. Playing the instruments while having fun.
And so anyway, enough yapping. Here's how I got the results that I did for each other's subjects. And since I was so limited on time, I had to become creative and find ways to study in less amount of time.
So feel free to skip around and I'll show you the example that I did, the mark I got, what a 9 was, and my personal difficulty rating for each other's subjects I took. And so let's start with the first subject. NXL IGCSE Maths.
And so a 9 for this subject was 163 marks out of 200 or 81% and I got 197 marks out of 200 which was 98.5% and the difficulty racing for maths was this. For me I've never been gifted but I've always been kind of strong at maths and also since I took additional maths as one of my extra GCSEs which was like maths but really hard normal maths like IGCSE math just became kind of easy and so for my like actual GCSE exams this was one of the subjects that I barely did. any revision because I had to use that time for other subjects because some of the subjects were very very difficult for me to get a nine and to be honest I do think that like I got lucky in the sense that the papers are really really easy I could have easily got full marks on this exam and it was just like one question that like I made a mistake on and I still know what that question is and here's how I got these results during school time if I didn't understand the topic which would come up quite frequently I would always teams message my maths teacher and i'm grateful she'd always reply and walk me through a problem even though i was probably really annoying her so my tip for maths is to always understand why something is sunny and don't let something that you don't know like marinate like just don't skip over your weaknesses and think like i'll come back to it later because when you learn more things in maths when you learn more advanced topics they all stack on top of your fundamentals like it all relies on you knowing how to do basic problems so if you don't strengthen like your foundations or like any type of like a problem the cracks will begin to show and i did like every single year pause paper so I was able to predict what type of questions will come up.
So for example, I knew in paper two maths, I knew that the last couple of questions would always be like a sequence question, a vector question and some like cylinder volume type of question and so I was able to prepare for that. Before I go on to my other subjects, if you want to know exactly what I did, the steps I took in all regards of being a student, how I managed my time, productivity systems I used, mindsets I had and even personal resources that I was able to use to get these grades, you should check out Student Accelerator which is my program for students helping them become the best student that they can be. The Meehan experts will help guide you through the process. you into becoming the student of your dreams.
And if this interests you, make sure to click the first link in the description, but more about that later. Alright, and next I'll group together biology, physics and chemistry as the sciences. I'll group them together because I actually got really, really similar marks for all of them.
So again, I did IGCST and Excel for all of them. And the exams for scientists were all out of 180 because of paper one and paper two. And I got 158, 155 and 152 out of 180 respectively for bio, chem and physics.
So they were all in the high 80%. And the grade nine was around 141 for all three, around 78%. The difficulty for each of these, for biology, I'll say it's this.
For chemistry, this. And for physics, this. As you can see.
for me biology was always just the easiest and chemistry and physics were much more difficult and also i decided like early year 11 that i hated the sciences i ruled out medicine and so like my enthusiasm for sciences kind of died down and so that kind of explains the kind of lower marks but that doesn't mean i didn't revise because to be quite honest scientists took up like so much of my time probably the second out of like all the subjects i took i had done revision consistently for these subjects since mox remember little but often is always key for revision but there was also a lot of cramming involved the way i revised these subjects to get these results was i revised off the specification i would write down the entire spec as you can see for all three of the subjects and then i'd mark down which was my strengths and which were my weaknesses and i knew this by doing loads of past papers and writing down like the mistakes i tended to make in notion That way I literally had a bank of like all the mistakes and my weaknesses and I knew I had to just work on those And so I just draw those again and again and again And I also remember for the two-month exam period I was always on quizlet on the bus like quizlet on the toilet like quizlet I'd search up like for example IG says he buys you paper on quizlet and there'll be sets other people have made covering like the core like Points that you need to learn for the exam And so just by like being able to do space repetition and actually revising by doing flashcards probably ended up getting me a lot more marks Just spam all the past papers that you have available and don't neglect mistakes. The next subject is English. So IGCSE English Literature, I got 139 out of 150 and the language mark actually wasn't shown.
But I bumped into like my English teacher in front of my gym and he said I did really well so I'll take his word for it. Difficulty for both, this. And to be honest, I was kind of disappointed with my English mark because English has always been my forte. And in my marks, I actually got 95% and 97% respectively for English language and literature. And now that I've gone down to 93%, although it can seem like I'm being annoying, like arguing about the couple of percents in the 90s.
90s because I had always got that like it did kind of suck but to be honest I did no revision so what did I expect a nine was 67% for English language and 80% for English literature so I ended up clearing those and the way I did that so my tip for English is I just got really friendly with words I always liked reading from a young age and so I consistently read since my 11 plus and that ended up helping me a lot and also I got really good at essay writing a tip I have is to get really familiar with English essay structures and understand like what kind of like structures and like analysis uh writers like and that'll get me loads and loads of marks because it's really clear like concise and it makes sure it ticks all the boxes so using this i also wrote skeleton essays for every single 12 mark are possible and kind of just memorize them so that it was so simple and easy also writing youtube scripts in my free time definitely helped out a lot and i also ended up reading my english literature book which was things fall apart like three times so just make sure you really know the text and poems and you'll be good for english and the next one history igcse and actually this one wasn't edXL this was CIE like i don't know what it stands for but yeah history CIE igcse and the difficulty for this is this boy do i have beef with history i actually ended up getting a seven in my mocks like i've never publicly announced this before and it's like covered up a lot of times but i just hated history so so much og viewers will know that my mom forced me to take this subject and although it was interesting i was just like always kind of at it i genuinely think like 99 of the amount of revision i did for gcses all went into history and the thing is like throughout the year i'd randomly get like nines but then i also randomly get like sixes and it was just so inconsistent which made me really nervous because like this might be the one subject that brings my entire gcse grades down and so as much as i hated it i knew i had to like lock in get a good result because imagine i'm gonna be i'll be like the study youtuber you've got like 10 nines but a seven like that just could not happen like straight nines i had to get and so this year i needed 113 out of 150 to get a ninth history which was so high that was a 10 increase in grey boundaries from last year but i clutched up and i got 85 which was 10 higher than what i needed for a night and so that actually that was the biggest plot twist and the way i got good at history is actually like a combination of a lot of things part of it was just brute forcing after learning each topic i would watch little summaries on youtube about like every topic i wrote down model answers for literally every single possible topic big in the spec and then when our school gave us this like a hundred thousand word document of like every single question by year i did most of them and i even had a one-to-one session with my teacher during study leave history i just had to read the textbook i really really get into like the details and it felt so so like endless like i'd read about like the munich pitch and then i realized that there was like so much about that in itself that there were like mini events that i needed to know inside out if i really want to get a top top mark and so that basically ended up with me like sticking like dates and about like history on the wall and like just always looking at like history dates doing flashcards on quizlet etc because I was just exposing myself to as much history as possible, hoping that I'd pick it up. And it actually ended up working. I started to draw like the spider web diagram in my mind.
And I saw how everything was kind of interconnected. And once you see like the interconnection, especially with history, that's when it starts to make sense. And also having the questions by topic and being able to do that really, really helps. But to be honest, I got really lucky with the exam questions this year because they were quite easy compared to the previous year examples. And so there's that as well.
But thank God I'll never have to do history again. Next is IG Sessy French, also at Excel. I needed 134 out of 160, and after history, this was the subject I was worried about the most, because I knew it was tough, these are really high grade boundaries. But I actually surprised myself, and I ended up getting 144 out of 160, only dropping 16 marks.
This was the best I had ever done in a French test, period. like during my school career. So I was actually really shocked. Most of my peers either had parents that like could speak French or had been learning French all the way from primary school. So I was disadvantaged and I knew I had to lock in.
The way I got such good results for French was in two ways. The first was immersion. When I was in high school, on the bus or train i just randomly like look outside the window i see trees and i ask myself okay what's that in french and i just like keep on immersing myself and like trying to ask myself like random pieces of french vocabulary wherever i went i listened to french songs i played valorant with the language set as french i even went to france for a week for an exchange trip and i'm not saying that's necessary i'm just showing you the extent i went to to immerse myself in french and it all really did help also for french a really practical tip is that it's 90 80 just vocabulary learn vocab sets and although it's really really boring just grind these out just do like 10 20 french words a day Do your fucking vocab. If you don't do your fucking vocab and we lose the vocab bowl, I kill the dog.
And you won't regret it because when you're good at vocab, you're able to understand it when you hear it and you're listening. You're able to use a wider range of vocabulary when you're speaking. You're able to understand what vocabulary means when you're reading, which is literally the entire point of reading, right? You're able to spice up your writing. You're covering all four bases of the French exam.
Also, idioms and level nine phrases are your best friend. I made a set of like these 30 phrases that I just memorized and I put everywhere. In my writing, my speaking.
and it made me sound so pro and like when my examiner asked me like what's your favorite food and i could say like uh it's actually sushi but it costs an arm and a leg which is such a shame like when i could say that like sakura yu de matet okay don't put that in no french um yeah it made me sound pro when i wasn't and it's a really good way to spice it up languages are hard to craft make sure to do little bit of it and lastly latin and music are grouped together because i know a lot of my viewers probably won't do these subjects you But I'll still briefly talk about them. The difficulty for both of these were this and to be completely honest I knew I was getting online for both of these subjects And so I really did not revise for this to make time for sciences, french and history And so for these subjects, I just recommend like since it's literally like these both of these are just memorization based subject. For music, I just memorized this table that I made. And for Latin, I just memorized the vocabulary and the syntax by using like memorization techniques, such as like making PowerPoints with like drawings, multi-sensory learning, and just like looking at them little but often to use on a space repetition. That's what I did to get a nine in these subjects.
An additional maths was probably the hardest GCSE that I took. It was really, really difficult. It's basically like half of the A-level course for maths, and the difficulty obviously will be this. But since like, I know like very, very few people will do this, the only tip I can have is the same for maths basically. Just get down to the- pretty pretty no just get down to the basics and make sure like when you don't understand the topic watch video walkthroughs read the mark scheme and get to know each and every step and know where you went wrong and anyway if you got this far i wish you luck i really recommend you check out my other videos because although like i briefly talked about one tip for each thing there's so much to study there's memorization there's like note-taking flashcards like what techniques should you even use and i feel like i do a good job in explaining all of these and you know it's backed up by my results and so if you're new here i'm looking forward to seeing you around and make sure to seek actually what you learned today if you want the most amount of help and you really want to like cement yourself and like the top of the top for the students you want to get into that echelon of like eliteness make sure to check out student accelerator because it really really is valuable so you can find out more about that with the first thing in the description as always i'll see you in the next one BAM!