Everybody knows that A Levels are tough, but the real question is which A Level is the hardest of all of them? We believe it depends on a number of things, namely your personal strengths and weaknesses.

1. Chemistry

The one that is commonly called the toughest is chemistry. This is due to the application based nature of the course which expects you to apply difficult concepts to a whole variety of different situations that you may have never encountered. The amount of work required is usually really high to do well at chemistry and therefore it requires a lot of dedication on the student’s part.

2. Physics

Similarly, physics is also called the hardest by many students for similar reasons. People tend to struggle with it due to maths-heavy content which can sometimes account for half the marks. It also involves learning complex theories alongside the difficult maths, which makes it a lot of new content to get your head around.

3. Further maths

Further maths also deserves a mention simply due to the fact that it's an extension on an already quite difficult A Level, so it is usually only taken by people who love maths and understand it naturally.

4. Languages

We'd suggest that languages are also one of the toughest. There is an expectation for you to be almost fluent by the end of A2 which means you learn endless contradicting grammar rules and some days it goes well but others you write things that are completely wrong. There has only been 1 A* out of the three languages that our school runs over the last five years, something we'd suggest is a testament to the difficulty of languages.

5. Photography

We also think that work-heavy subjects like photography deserve a mention. Despite being commonly recognised as a ‘soft’ subject, it requires a lot of dedication and time to get your work done and it also requires a lot of specialist equipment. These subjects are still equally as difficult, just in other ways to your typical STEM subjects.

6. Essay-based subjects

Essay based subjects also get called difficult mainly due to the sheer content you're expected to learn and write in the exam. This could be anything from key players in a war for history or endless amounts of quotes for English literature. The essay writing method at A level is difficult to nail and requires a lot of practice to get there.

Despite all of this, we'd say that it still depends on your strengths and weaknesses. We find STEM subjects relatively straightforward once we have our head around them but we could never quite perfect our essay writing. Even if some are commonly thought of as harder, we'd never definitively say which is truly the most difficult A Level.