A level exam

I got 73/100 and I'm now a chartered mechanical engineer.

Challenge accepted :)

I'll have a go tomorrow

Which exam board?

edexcel/mei personally.
C1 as you said is not hard, the way you loose marks is because of stupid errors. The three I lost on that page were for thinking 28/2=19.
My method is much more useful for the other topics - the other day I was practically lecturing my class on the complex numbers part because when I was taught it I actually made sure I understood why everything was the way it was. Rather than just accept that |z-(x+yj)| has a centre of x+yj, I found out why, and why it isnt -x-yj. That sort of understanding is key.

I scored 595/600 in A-Level Maths and 590/600 in Further Maths.
Advice - do the exam, then do it again. You can usually do them, especially C1, quickly enough and actually have time to redo it.
Compare both answers, see if there are any discrepancies and change them as necessary.

Ty mayn

did this last year, got 100 UMS, it was MEI btw
its easy

any more a level bros here?
ive got a2's coming up, doing mei modules on core 3 and 4, mechanics 2, stats 2, differential equations and further pure 2.
feeling alright tbhhhh m8s, got 17/18 on me DE coursework wew
anyone else?

>differential equations
I would have thought this would be part of FP2 or FP3 for MEI... it's a module by itself? How can they fill the content of that for A-Level?

its by far the hardest module IMO, goes into tangent fields, Eulers method, linear first and second order homogenous and non homogenous equations and also oscillations, its also quite applied with the questions often pulling in aspects of mechanics

its pretty hard lad!

Sounds like a mix of FP2 + M2 + M3 Edexcel, must be fun! Almost makes me wish I was on MEI - you guys get a lot more content than us Edexcel guys. I heard that you have an FP4 too? Or maybe that's OCR, not too sure.
I've done all of the Edexcel modules and they seem to be running out of material to cover as they go along and their textbooks get thinner and thinner.

Im about to take as further over the next few weeks, and then A2 further next year. Do any of you have any advice about whats worth reading up on to make the year easy? And what isnt worth reading up on because its easy to pick up anyway?

Which exam board?

mei

Ill be doing C3 C4 FP2 DE M2 and NM (not sure on NM though)

That's too bad, I had great recommendations for Edexcel since that's what I did.
For MEI, you'll have to wait for the other user.

MEI master race

I'm not really sure the point of MEI - it doesn't prepare you any better for STEP and is a lot more work than Edexcel.

Triple check

i would advise being aware of the hyperbolic functions earlier rather than later, if I could do it again I would just make sure my algebra skills were top notch from the start of the year, and it really really helps to have a good understanding of the trig functions( eg. know the graphs inside out and learn the identities), also be familiar with binomial expansions and the infinite series. get yourself a copy of the mei exam formula book and carry it with you all year, if your school wont give you one, print one off yourself, its invaluable. learn what you need to remember, and what you dont, a lot of things can be inferred from the booklet, reducing what you have to memorise

main thing is to just have great algebra skills and be a wiz at rearranging stuff
good luck man

On the topic of checking though - when you check you obviously need to go into the question with a fresh mind, or else you will make the same mistakes again.

How do you maximise your chance of noticing mistakes? The other day I did an M1 mock and I lost a few marks because when working out the range of a projectile I didnt resolve the vector. That would be an easy mistake to fix but I just didnt spot it.

When I did my a levels a couple of years back mei used my schools maths class for the "fp4" trial module, really called further pure with technology, which was based in TI n-spire and maple cas software. It was easy as fuck so I'm not sure how it's panned out since then.

I felt the mei exam board was great prep for uni; as a maths undergrad I had pretty much covered the entirety of my first year course except the second half of the group theory course, some "foundations of mathematics", the multivariable parts of calculus, and the entirety of the real analysis course.

I know that sounds like a lot of exceptions but in reality it reduced my workload to virtually zero relative to those who only had a level maths or a2 further. Even more so those not on mei.

For reference, I took the following modules:
M1-4
S1-4
C1-4
D1-2
DE (differential equations)
FP1-3 + FPT

So in the end of it I got 3 maths A levels + my other subjects. Worked out pretty well considering it took substantially less work than doing 3 a levels in unrelated subjects would have done

top zozz

me too. Edexcel, right?

Replying my own post here but this is VERY IMPORTANT advice to any a level maths student.

Go out and buy the TI N-spire non cas calculator RIGHT NOW!!!

You may think it is overkill but get very good at using it and it is an absolute life saver; it has all the stats distributions programmed in, so no more fuck ups with continuity corrections, using the wrong value from the stats tables by selecting the wrong column by accident etc.

Also any simultaneous equations? Put them in a matrix, raise it to the power of -1, to solve.

Nsolve command to solve definite integrals; so any definite integral you are asked to compute you can plug some easy values into your formula, do likewise on the calculator to verify your answers, makes mistakes very easy to spot and stops you wasting time rechecking right answers multiple times.

Cont.

Further, it can handle complex numbers, and various other things which lend themselves to algebraic errors.

Now I am not advocating cheating, but in the settings page you can massively reduce the number of functions which are disabled by exam mode, and it will still display that it is in exam mode (+ most teachers will not know enough about how to use it to even check that it's in exam mode at all), and once it is in exam mode you can still create new word documents and save formulae, equations, even written notes explaining concepts, what letters correspond to what variables, etc etc. Even write out known proofs if you can be arsed. And you can have up to 50 of these pages open simultaneously if you so desire.

I could go for on and on about this wonderful a level destroyer: there was only 1 question on my fp1 exam that wasn't immediately answered by my calculators functions, etc. But I won't bother.

Al I can say I BUY IT RIGHT NOW!! It is more than worth the ~£80 you'll fork out on it, just for the time it will save you being able to check answers with absolute certainty, as well as massively reducing margin for human algebraic errors etc.

t. 3A* maths, further maths and further maths additional (mei)

Anyone here taking Singapore-Cambridge A levels this year?

>coversine
>versine

TIL

any edexcel a level people here?
doing c3,c4,m2,d1,s1,fp1 this season :)
how are you'all finding it?

underageb&
fuck off 17 year old (at best)

or 18 doing a retake?

Nice bullshit

only doing AS f/maths this year?

Doing m3 in 2 days

You realise that the casio fx-991es can do this too right?
It's what I used throughout - I bought a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition with me into the exam and didn't even touch it.
I'm:

>d1,s1
I'm so sorry to hear that.
D2 doesn't get any better, on the other hand S2 is much better than S1, but then it drops with S3/S4 as there really isn't that much material.

Look forward to M4/M5! They're the closest thing in A-Level to the STEP exams.

>First AS exam

There's no age limit to doing these exams.

underage b&

It doesn't matter too much because you can just retake it. With the knowledge of C3 and C4 it is trivial to get 95+% with no revision.

Hong Kong A Levels are easy, did it on transfer when I was fourteen.

you do realise that the UMS is distributed such that a fixed proportion always get 100? i got 100 in c1 last year. most people going to do maths/physics/computing/economics at uni in my school got full UMS in maths/further maths.

maybe you went to a shit school?

yeah. needed it to do maths at uni (though my offers A*A*A, further maths AS is irrevelent?!).
would have chose it last year but i only became autistic at maths in year 12

..........held back a year?? ok fair he's probably underage but come on, stop being a party pooper

C1 and C2 are trivial but C3 and C4 fucked my shit up.

t. 2nd Year Japanese student

Practice

board?

also doing c1 this wednesday, with edexcel.

just remain focused during the exam and you'll do fine.
check over your paper as many times as you can once you've finished it.

All those weird ones are just things like (1 - cos(x)), nothing special
Haversine (i.e. versine / 2) was important in ocean navigation and got its own lookup tables and shit pre-calculators. Don't think anybody cares nowadays except for historical reasons.
I love me some unit circles though.