A-Level Physics
The diagram is the answer.
Most lost physics marks are decided before any algebra starts, on a diagram with a force missing. Lumi draws it with you, one arrow at a time, and lets you stop it mid-line.
- Drawn liveNot described in text
- 8+ hrsA month on Plus
- £0To start
Two problems that look identical
A physics paper comes back at sixty per cent and there is no way to tell from the number which of two completely different things went wrong. Either the physics did not land, or it landed fine and the marks went to rearranging, units, standard form and significant figures. The second is far more common than anyone admits, and it is invisible because it never fails loudly — it just takes two marks off every question in the paper.
They need opposite work. One is a teaching problem and the other is a twenty-minute drilling problem, and the fastest thing a tutor does is tell you which one you have. Bring back a marked paper and that conversation takes about five minutes.
Why the whiteboard matters most here
Physics is the subject where the picture is not an illustration of the reasoning, it is where the reasoning happens. A free-body diagram with a missing normal reaction is not a slightly worse diagram, it is a different question, and everything after it is arithmetic on the wrong problem. Field lines, circuits, ray diagrams, phasors, the shape of a graph before any values go on it — all of it is spatial, and prose describing a diagram is a worse diagram no matter how well written.
So Lumi draws while it talks, and you can interrupt it. Point at an arrow and ask why it is that length. Ask what happens to the whole diagram if the surface is frictionless. Ask it to redraw the circuit with the parallel branch pulled out sideways, which is the single most useful thing anyone ever did for circuit questions.
Where A-Level Physics actually breaks
- Fields. Gravitational and electric fields are taught as an analogy and examined as two things that differ in exactly the places the analogy hides.
- Circular motion and simple harmonic motion, which arrive close together, both involve going round, and are not the same idea at all.
- Capacitors and exponential decay, where the graph is understood and the log-linear version of it is not.
- Quantum: the photoelectric effect punishes vague answers harder than almost anything else on the paper.
- The six-mark explain question, which wants a chain — this happens, which causes this, which is why that — and not a list of true statements about the topic.
- Uncertainties and error bars, taught in Year 12 as an afterthought and examined in Year 13 as if they were not.
What a session looks like
You describe what is not working, out loud or typed, or photograph the question — the topic on the question and the step you actually lost are usually different, and it works back to the second. Then it explains while building the diagram in front of you, changing it as you push back. Ask for a question at the end and it goes on the board, which is the part that decides whether the explanation was real or just pleasant.
Bring the paper
Attach past papers, mark schemes, your practical write-up or a photo of your own working — at the start or mid-lesson. Your working is the useful one, and you can draw it on the pad and have it read line by line. An examiner can only see what you wrote; a tutor looking at the same page can see that the physics was right and the same rearrangement error has appeared four times, which is a fix rather than a term of revision.
What it does not do
It does not run the experiment, it does not replace your teacher, and it does not replace sitting full papers to time. Like anything of this kind it can be confidently wrong, so check anything that decides a mark against your specification and your data booklet.
The full Physics and Chemistry breakdown lists the topics board by board.
Common questions
For explanation, yes, and physics is the subject where the whiteboard earns its place — most of what goes wrong is a diagram problem before it is a physics problem. Where it cannot help is the practical work itself: handling the equipment, taking the readings, and the judgement about uncertainty that only comes from having done it badly once.
That is the whole method. Free-body diagrams built up one arrow at a time, field lines, circuits redrawn until the series and parallel parts are obvious, ray diagrams, graphs sketched and then changed while you watch. You can stop it mid-diagram and ask why a particular arrow is there, which is usually the exact question worth asking.
With the reasoning around them, yes: what the experiment is establishing, why the graph is plotted that way, which quantity the gradient represents, and where the uncertainty comes from. It cannot do the practical, and your notes from the lesson you actually sat are the better record of what happened on the day.
Tell it your board and it teaches to it — physics specifications differ in options and in which equations sit in the data booklet rather than in your memory, and revising the wrong side of that distinction is a way to lose marks on content you knew perfectly well. The reviewed physics pack, checked line by line against the spec, is AQA GCSE Physics Higher; at A-level it teaches the topic to whichever board you name.
It is the more common of the two and it is worth naming out loud, because the fix is different. Rearranging before substituting, standard form, unit conversions and significant figures are a small set of skills that leak marks across every single paper. Say that is the problem and the session is about that rather than about the topic the question happened to be on.
The free plan is 3 lessons of up to 10 minutes in total, with no card. Plus is over 8 hours a month across every subject, which works out at roughly £2 an hour of tutoring on the yearly plan — and it covers your maths and chemistry too, which a physics tutor does not.
Read next
No card. No countdown.
Ready to understand something new?
Bring the thing you got stuck on today.