A-level mocks a complete failure

My experience was with helping undergraduates rather than with A levels, but I might venture to offer some advice.

This sort of difficulty will affect any student, but can be a lot more problemmatic with aspergers/HFA. From the NT perspective you tend to follow a taught mindset, indoctrinated into you by teaching and personal study methods, which means when a different technique sneaks up on you, people (like teachers) don't seem to notice that some re-alignment is needed.

Transition from A level to undergraduate has major changes, and some bright A level students flounder at university because they just cannot comprehend the new mindset.

The AS situation is harder because:

Not interconnecting socially makes it harder to pick up on collective new insight. Basically his NT classmates will be discussing the new concepts, your son may not be getting connected with that process. Mind you, the collective learning process (the blind leading the blind) can get it horribly wrong, following popular myths. Also by A level a certain degree of gamesmanship enters and the brighter ones, previously held back by the troublemakers, learn how to plant false trails, and watch their slower classmates get confused. I'm tempted to say revenge is sweet.

Being given to routines, it is harder to change or to spot the need to change technique. Also as you move up the education system, learning by rote becomes less important than being able to discuss or explain.

With AS your son may be embarrassed about some things that he perceives beneath his intelligence, or just frustrated at having to do plodding things when he feels smarter. The trouble is, increasingly, he'll find that he is expected to show his rough working in calculations (indeed more marks may be given to the roughs than the answers) or compare and contrast concepts, or show some thought processes as to how he reaches a conclusion. Many people on the spectrum get caught out because they don't feel they ought to have to do things a certain way. I'm afraid there's a lot of "jumping through hoops" ahead.

Some people with AS are too driven to logicality in their writing (Mr Data has to take a lot of the blame for this). He will be expected more and more to use certain techniques in how he explains things or develops ideas. He cannot hope to get through with an overly rigid or inflexible way of writing.

Relevance becomes increasingly critical. He needs to read questions carefully and ensure he fully completes what the question expects. This may take a lot of practice. He must resist the temptation to answer with what he thinks will be more interesting than the question set. Also he needs to reduce the amount of extraneous detail - things he feels the examiner might like to know also, which the examiner will interpret as him not knowing how to answer the question.

At the moment there is no option in sight to change the curriculum for people with AS, even though I do feel there are strong arguments to allow this. Assessment is designed around NTs, and AS has thinking process characteristics that are going to clash with this. I've tried to put forward alternative strategies but so far there's no give.

He will just have to grin and bear it. It's humiliating to have to do things the NT way, but for the time being its the only option.

My experience was with helping undergraduates rather than with A levels, but I might venture to offer some advice.

This sort of difficulty will affect any student, but can be a lot more problemmatic with aspergers/HFA. From the NT perspective you tend to follow a taught mindset, indoctrinated into you by teaching and personal study methods, which means when a different technique sneaks up on you, people (like teachers) don't seem to notice that some re-alignment is needed.

Transition from A level to undergraduate has major changes, and some bright A level students flounder at university because they just cannot comprehend the new mindset.

The AS situation is harder because:

Not interconnecting socially makes it harder to pick up on collective new insight. Basically his NT classmates will be discussing the new concepts, your son may not be getting connected with that process. Mind you, the collective learning process (the blind leading the blind) can get it horribly wrong, following popular myths. Also by A level a certain degree of gamesmanship enters and the brighter ones, previously held back by the troublemakers, learn how to plant false trails, and watch their slower classmates get confused. I'm tempted to say revenge is sweet.

Being given to routines, it is harder to change or to spot the need to change technique. Also as you move up the education system, learning by rote becomes less important than being able to discuss or explain.

With AS your son may be embarrassed about some things that he perceives beneath his intelligence, or just frustrated at having to do plodding things when he feels smarter. The trouble is, increasingly, he'll find that he is expected to show his rough working in calculations (indeed more marks may be given to the roughs than the answers) or compare and contrast concepts, or show some thought processes as to how he reaches a conclusion. Many people on the spectrum get caught out because they don't feel they ought to have to do things a certain way. I'm afraid there's a lot of "jumping through hoops" ahead.

Some people with AS are too driven to logicality in their writing (Mr Data has to take a lot of the blame for this). He will be expected more and more to use certain techniques in how he explains things or develops ideas. He cannot hope to get through with an overly rigid or inflexible way of writing.

Relevance becomes increasingly critical. He needs to read questions carefully and ensure he fully completes what the question expects. This may take a lot of practice. He must resist the temptation to answer with what he thinks will be more interesting than the question set. Also he needs to reduce the amount of extraneous detail - things he feels the examiner might like to know also, which the examiner will interpret as him not knowing how to answer the question.

At the moment there is no option in sight to change the curriculum for people with AS, even though I do feel there are strong arguments to allow this. Assessment is designed around NTs, and AS has thinking process characteristics that are going to clash with this. I've tried to put forward alternative strategies but so far there's no give.

He will just have to grin and bear it. It's humiliating to have to do things the NT way, but for the time being its the only option.