Should I drop down to Standard English? I wanna do Architecture later on but I genuinely despise Advanced English at the moment but everyone Is telling me to keep to advanced. I'm doing my assessment at the moment and I genuinely feel like the maximum mark I would get is a C.
sorry for the rant
English Advanced and Standard have the same exam requirements (Paper 1 is almost identical and Paper 2 has the same structure but different texts).
If you drop down to Standard, it will be easier but only by a trivial amount. Less than 1% of the state who take Standard manage to get into the top band 6 compared to English Advanced (which normally reaches the double digits) which may work against you considering the competition for a spot at architecture school. Also, know that your final exam mark is not your raw mark, it is adjusted in terms of performance descriptors (i.e -> they mark leniently and categorise responses into different levels of sophistication/knowledge).
This is all a bit complicated but what I am trying to say is that if you are a C-average student in English Advanced, you will probably get C's in Standard, since the requirements are more or less the same (minus the higher-order concepts of Shakespeare or Jane Austin e.c.t). You should speak to your teacher and head of department before you move down. I will say that there have been miracles (per se) in English Advanced - last year a student who got a raw mark of 67/100 (Band 3) got adjusted to an 80/100 (Band 5) since the markers understand that the underlying concepts are harder to grasp they tend to be extremely lenient during marking(check out
https://rawmarks.info/english/english-advanced/).
If you are generally struggling in English Advanced, Standard is a good choice, but just note that if you trust the process and stick with Advanced (assuming you try and put in effort) You may see your C's get inflated to a high B mark by the end of year 12.
Do take my advice with a grain of salt though.
Also, SparkNotes is a lifesaver, especially for Shakespearean texts (summarises the key quotes/thems + puts the text into a more modern friendly tone).
Your teachers are more than likely willing to give you extra support since they like having students.
Anyway, you do you - it's your life after all
.
Hope this helps.
please pm me!
