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one of the things I think is that being good at A Levels is actually a hindrance in the humanities university subjects becasue of the way A Levels are designed so grade tariffs are even more laughable
the amount of work that goes into unpicking certain habits of mind, trying to find the right answer by thinking of it as a pre-existing hidden thing, is just enormous
the difference between following a set of reasonably complicated but precise instructions, and understanding a set of parameters for a responsible, defensible argument is much bigger than it needs to be
and this difference is how you get a lot of confused questions about 'how many books need to be in the bibliography' or 'what's the best thing to read' - the questions aren't confused in the sense that they don't make sense, but they are working off a different set of assumptions
the only small success i have ever had with this is teaching an introductory 'historian's craft'-type course that each tutor bases around an influential book in their field, and i choose a very well-known but absolutely shit one - to try and get them to see this
