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General Studies
A-Level Course (AS 3831 and A 7831)
Full specificationGeneral Studies is a compulsory subject for all students, with release from the examinations only permitted to our boarders from the Far East. This tends to alarm students who are unaware of what the subject involves, particularly those unfamiliar with our past record in it. Fortunately, worries diminish steadily as the course goes on, and ambitions increase.
With teaching time of one hour per week we shall never be able to claim the 'weight' of students' other A-level subjects, but it is the time factor that gives the subject its special status. We are aiming to provide them with an A-level at considerably less than their normal outlay, the key to success being the students' interest in the broad and topical issues that may well have claimed their attention for a number of years. We build on work done at pre-GCSE level in Tutorials, English and RSS, among other subjects, and repeatedly advise students that our best textbook is a broadsheet newspaper.
The course is divided into three 'realms': the Social, Cultural and Scientific. These labels cover an immense area, and there is no such thing as blanket coverage. Nor, for the same reason, is there any possibility of predicting the content that examiners will put into their Papers. What we therefore try to do is show how an informed mind can relate to the range of material the examiners present. We teach (or reinforce) intellectual skills rather than facts, these being a major asset to our students as they proceed towards and into higher education.
It has therefore been no surprise that General Studies' status with universities has risen steadily. Elite institutions and courses still exclude the subject from their grade offers, but the majority of offers now include it. In some departments, Politics for instance, it may be given particular weight, universities' own research indicating its value as a predictor of degree performance. In Medical Departments it attracts interest as evidence that prospective doctors do not just see themselves as "good scientists".
Our limited time-tabling would not work if teachers did not give the subject considerably more than an hour's attention per week. Over two years students will meet at least seven teachers, each with a distinctive contribution to make, and to one of these they will periodically return for an overall assessment of their progress. This form of teacher-involvement is a further distinctive feature of our course.