EPQ - To do or not to do?

This is your opinion. For me, the EPQ is an exciting opportunity to do something different. It’s not like any other subject, it’s like a really long (few months duration) rewarding essay homework. You explore sources, dissect scientific literature, and evaluate sources to then produce a finished final piece to showcase your dedication and work. But I won’t lie – it’s fairly hard. It’s hard to start but once you’re in, it becomes so much easier.

I’ll give you the EPQ in a nutshell: it’s what you make it. You can dedicate all your time and efforts into it like I did, and it’ll pay off. When I wasn’t volunteering or working, I would sit on my computer, download PDF scientific literature to deduce and write sections of my EPQ. 5,000 words sounds way too much and a long task, but you know you’re doing it right if you end up in the 6,000 mark and need to start cutting paragraphs and concisely chopping your work down to the word limit.

The EPQ is time consuming – no argument there. You will need to be an expert at time management. For me, I got an A* in the EPQ through dedicating practically all my summer and evenings at the beginning of Year 13 to refining material and writing a 5,000 word piece on how two chemotherapy drugs work. I described their mechanism of action in combating colorectal disease that was becoming metastatic before comparing them in terms of effectiveness. I had a 21 page document explaining my findings accompanied by a 50 page sources table that evaluated each source I used. This was OVERBOARD. People get A*s in the EPQ in much less work than this. But the EPQ will reward you with a high grade if you feed it with time and dedication!

So what’s good about the EPQ? It shows which students are commited, dedicated, love a challenge and demonstrate a variety of skills. They can deduce literature into an understanding that makes sense to them – like at uni. They handle primary sourced and secondary sourced data – like at uni. They show which students can work hard and follow a path to create a journey from start, research, refine, produce, finish – like at uni. They show students that have a passion in the subject (eg. Music students may produce a song or write about a particular music style and how it may have developed over time etc).

The EPQ makes your UCAS application even more attractive. It kinda makes you look like the perfect university candidate, so they’ll offer you that interview! It’s very different, so I will recommend it highly! It’s literally the A-Level version of blood, sweat and tears.

It is an A-Level, so an A* is available. Some schools give a small timeframe for the EPQ, so you need to try and craft two years worth of work (similar to an A-Level) into that timeframe to produce a final piece.

The "selling points" of the EPQ (eg. making your UCAS application more attractive etc) is what I have heard from teachers in my sixth forms and speaking to some student tour guides at different university open days.