A levels!!! (wk. 3)
I thought we were friends Edexcel. Little did I know…
Don’t be fooled by that - there’s another page of timetable!
Summary
Only 3 this week so not too bad in that respect.
Bad, however, with respect to yesterday’s Further Stats paper. Whoever wrote parts (c) and (e) of Q7 must have been on smoke. Utter rubbish 😢
The papers of the week
| Day | Exam ref. | Thoughts |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | H432 / 01 / Inorganic Chemistry | As I started the paper, my immediate reaction was basically ‘oh goodness, surely the multiple choice should be harder?!’. Fortunately, it did soon pick up in terms of difficulty level. Overall reaction is that it was a pretty typical Chemistry paper (albeit with a trickier than usual \(K_p\) question that seemed to throw people off). Nothing that felt impossible at least. |
| Tuesday | 9MA0 / 02 / Pure 2 | Like the Pure 1 paper, this wasn’t a massive problem. Admittedly, some of the questions were more challenging that I expected before opening the paper. Especially the question about the radii of intersecting circles seemed to resemble a MAT/TMUA question much more than I would expect of an A level question (not that I’m complaining). Contrary to the questions, my biggest worry was actually about whether I had put my name on the front of the exam paper - quite possibly the easiest thing to do on each exam. This resulted in a slightly embarassing trip to the exams office, where I was pleased to hear of their strategy for dealing with unnamed scripts. |
| Friday | 9FM0 / 3B / Further Stats 1 | Right. Absolutely awful as a paper and I’ve not heard of a single person who enjoyed it. The main problems arose from bad time management - 15 minutes for the whole of Q7 (18 marks + hardest on the paper) - bad idea. Also there were small bits of other questions I was displeased with, but damage from that should be limited. Definitely a challenging paper and I’d be shocked if they don’t lower the grade boundaries to recognise this. Though I suppose that I’m quite fortunate since I studied FP1 on top of FS1 and FM1, which gives me another shot at upping my overal Further Maths mark. If I do better on FP1, then it subsumes one of the other ‘option’ papers and optimises the awarded grade, so I just need to smash that one now to top off this Further Maths course! Actually, to be fair to this FS1 paper, the first few questions were quite quaint. I must admit I quite liked how they asked to find \(\text{Var}(X^2)\) and wanted that neat lil explanation to go with the \(\chi^2\) expected freqency stuff. |
If you couldn’t tell already, that Further Stats paper has sort of infuriated me; I’d call it fifty fifty.
Unpopular opinion: maybe a blessing in disguise since it could now give purpose to the FP1 exam on Wednesday?
Surely not six more
Regrettably so.
Having been stuck in exams mode for a long few weeks now, it’s gonna be such a massive relief when I’m finally free and off on holiday! (provided I don’t screw the last week up)
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