What are T-Levels?
T-Levels consist of 80% learning as well as 20% industry placement so that you have the opportunity to put your skills into action and see how they can be used in the real world giving you vital experience.
The exams consist of papers such as the ones you would see while doing exams in A-Levels as well as an employer set project (ESP) which is a set of python tasks such as Debugging, Developing and Analysing a piece of code. This is what I preferred over the core paper exams as it is a hands on way to test your learning and the tasks are set through a discussion with employers to make sure that you are solving real world problems.
The last exam that you will have is called Occupational Specialism (OS) and this is a three month long exam where you have a brief and using that you need to go from designing and planning all the way to producing a real world working demo where you can get users to review it and then write an analysis of your work and improvements that should be made.
- 315 Hours of industry placement
- Employer set project
- Occupational specialism
- Core paper exams
My experience with T-Levels:
The course that I chose to do was Digital Production, Design and Development at Activate Learning. In this course I have learnt everything about digital technologies from the legal and ethical impacts to how to create an application from the planning phase all the way through to development, testing and release. We have also looked at emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing and Augmented Reality, etc.
I enjoy this course due to the amount of hands on learning compared to when I did computer science in secondary school. This helps me as i sometimes struggle to learn through reading and writing and the paper exams in school were always where i struggled. Where as the T-Level being graded through end of year projects/exams is really helpful as i can show my expertise in the way i have learnt. Some exams even have limited internet access which is useful as when I am coding the use of stack overflow has never failed to help me find or debug an error.
I also enjoyed how to learn we started off simple using scratch to get eveyone upto the same level but then moved onto python and libraries such as pandas and matplotlib to run data analysis. We have covered most of the improtant python modules and have learnt in-depth how to use them. We also complete multiple progress checks per unit which were to complete the code, answer some multiple choice questions online or even make a small program to show our understanding.
College Vs School:
For me I preferred the amount of freedom that comes with college as I have many friends who go to sixth form at my old school and you were not allowed to go home early even when you had lessons — you had to submit a work from home request, you could not go outside for lunch in the first year. Whereas in college when your lessons are finished you are free to go and at lunch time if you want to go to burger king you can feel free to walk or drive over. The whole experience makes it feel more grown up as you need to take everything into your own hands as they will offer support when asked but you need to take control and revise and make sure that you make a good use of your spare time.
Conclusion.
Overall I believe that I made the right decision as the learning style is more tailored to me, learning through creating instead of revising and looking at books and doing paper tests but that is purely my preference. We even do small quizzes at the end of units which are to develop small programs or online multiple choice questions.
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