Hey everyone,

After receiving the majority of my results, I thought I'd share some tips that may help others. For a bit of context, I just finished my 4^th year studying Maths and CompSci at a top institution in London and have achieved an overall result I am proud of. This is something myself and some of my close friends made sure to implement such that we all achieved very good grades (80% ). I'll keep it very brief but feel free to ask questions!

1. Before selecting your modules, request the results of previous years for the different options available through whatdotheyknow.com (they'll be previous requests you can follow a template of). You can request statistics for modules (and even the different components of each module) such as the 25^th, 75^th, 95^th percentiles as well as the mean, etc. It does take a while for the university to respond so I'd make sure to request this as soon as you can before module selection opens.
2. Once you've received the statistics, see what modules have a high 5^th percentile. This can give an indication that the module itself is not that hard to grasp. You'd also want to do the same for the mean and the 95^th percentile. The 95^th percentile can show you what a student who has put in the hours can expect to achieve. The mean is a good indicator of what you're expected to get if you just go to the lectures and be an average student.
3. After seeing the statistics, you can then start grouping modules that may have overlapping content. This would mean that you spend less time across the modules and that revising one part of the module helps strengthen your knowledge for the other module.

Once you've simmered down the choices, you can then start looking into the specifics of the modules:

• If you have a good group of friends (keep each other accountable and hard-working), group-based assessments are really nice and enjoyable.
• Coursework-based assessments are usually nicer for myself as I have more time to work on it. You can find previous courseworks of earlier years that may give a hint, use materials from other sources, talk over concepts with friends (not colluding but rather discussing techniques in classes or similar) and so on.
• For exam-based assessments, you can usually see if the past papers are similar in structure. If so, you can devise questions and formulate a study plan around it. For example, if you know the first 3 questions are usually just matrix multiplication, then you can spend some time focusing on that.

I personally chose more coursework-based modules and only had about 2 exams this year. When exam season came, I didn't feel stressed or packed as I only 2 exams that were nicely spaced out (got lucky with that I guess).

I'll keep this updated if I recall anything else, but feel free to put down some more tips down below :)

EDIT 1: This post was primarily written to give advice to people who are looking to maximise their grades, make dean’s list, meet a graduate offer, and so forth. Even if a module may have better statistics than another, if you’d enjoy the content more then go for it! This is what I did for myself.

EDIT 2: I also should mention to message students who had taken the module previously and ask for the content to see if it’s something you’d enjoy / have the prerequisites to do. Only issue would be if module lead has changed and a revamp of the module has occurred.