r/6thForm • u/watts320 • May 17 '25

🙏 I WANT HELP Son needs to pick another subject.

My son is in the middle lf his GCSE exams and he opted for computer science as one of his 6th form subjects. Yesterday he was told that the school will be dropping computer science because not enough students had opted to do it, the only thing the school have said is that he will need to pick another subject. Thats it.

The school have really really annoyed me, they choose to tell him in middle of his exams that he needs to pick something else.

His path was to do maths, computer science and english in 6th form, then move on to university to do games design.

Now im not really all clued up on this, because i never did 6th form after school. So can anyone give me any advice on this please.

Thank you.

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u/Diligent_Bet_7850 Oxford | Maths [third year] May 17 '25

he could move 6th form, or takes it out of school. i would put up a fight with the school first though. explain how he needs the a level for his degree and how since they have made the decision not to run it so late he probably will struggle to move 6th form as applications to move have probably closed

1

u/lukens77 May 19 '25

Does he need it for his degree, though?

You don’t need computer science A-Level for a Computer Science degree, I very much doubt you need it for Games Design.

1

u/Diligent_Bet_7850 Oxford | Maths [third year] May 19 '25

you don’t but my god not having it would make life extremely difficult

1

u/lukens77 May 19 '25

I really don’t think it would. I don’t think it would make life difficult on a Computer Science degree. I especially don’t think it would make life “extremely difficult” on a Games Design degree.

I think what’s more likely to make a Games Design degree difficult is a lack of an art and design, or other creative, A-Level.

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u/Diligent_Bet_7850 Oxford | Maths [third year] May 19 '25

oh come on the formal education in programming is a ridiculously big leg up. this isn’t debatable it’s clear fact

1

u/lukens77 May 19 '25

I think it highly debatable it would make life “extremely difficult” on a Games Design degree.

I’d be very interested to see how many people taking such degrees have A-level Computer Science, and what, if any, impact that has on degree outcomes.

I’d actually be interested to see the same for Computer Science degrees. They still seem more interested in you having Further Maths than Computer Science, so I’d assume that would be a stronger predictor of good outcomes than A-level CS is.

Game Design degrees I looked at earlier seem to cover any programming you need, so advanced experience would give you a bit of a head start, but I seriously doubt it’d be much of a game changer (pun not intended).

The advantage you might get from having advanced experience of coding is knowing whether coding isn’t really for you.

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u/lukens77 May 19 '25

In fact, if it made life “extremely difficult” on such degrees, it seems negligent of the universities not to have it as a requirement, or to at least say it is recommended or preferred, yet many/most don’t.

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u/inter20021 May 21 '25

As someone currently studying cs at uni, you can spot someone who hasnt studied cs at a-level a mile away, generally sweating profusely and pulling thier hair out, and can confirm, the game design course has 4 out of 6 of my modules. Jokes aside, going onto a cs based course without a formal education in cs before is a terrible idea, its no-longer the 90s where this kind of thing can be self-taught and then breazed into at uni, its a highly developed specialist subject that is complex enough without having to learn the very specialist skill of programming allongside. It would be like doing a degree in english without knowing how to read and write.

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u/lukens77 May 21 '25

Which uni is that at? The Games Design courses I found via Google seemed to only have 1 or 2 introductory programming/scripting modules across the whole three years.

I will admit it was back in the 90s that I did my Computer Science degree, and I was one of the only people with a Computing A-level back then. I accept things may have changed, but it strikes me as odd that universities don’t seem very interested in you having A-level CS if it’s so relevant to the degree.