Maths - exam number one

On Saturday, I sat the first of two exams for the maths subject I’m studying (effectively the exam was a year 11 one). It went well – I finished nearly an hour early (it was a three hour exam) and decided to leave so I didn’t “fix” an answer that didn’t need fixing – I’d already checked everything twice.

I found it quite difficult to prepare for, though – my usual exam preparation technique consists of doing revision notes, re-working any problems that I had noted on the way through as being particularly difficult, memorising notes to the best of my ability, then doing a series of past exam papers as practice exams under exam conditions. This gives me a good idea of where my weak points are (the things I need to cram into my head just before I walk in and get down on paper the minute I’m allowed to write) and also some idea of whether the time provided for the exam is likely to be enough for me to do it in.

This time, there were no previous exam papers available – not only that, but there was no information on what percentage of the overall marks the exam contributes – nor, when I got the exam, was there any indication of what marks each individual question was worth.

Now, normally when I first get into an exam room, and I’m allowed to pick up a writing implement (and after writing down those easily forgettable things I mentioned earlier), I work out roughly how many minutes per mark I have and draw up a quick list of how long that translates to for each question – that way I find I’m not spending way too much time on a question that is not worth many marks – I also usually try to allow for 10 minutes review time at the end to find and fix the inevitable “stupid” mistakes that I always seem to make (like the 2 + 2 = 5 that slipped through the net in my final year at high school).

So I found myself constantly checking the time as I finished each question and wondering whether I was on track or not – I was continually fighting the temptation to just rush through questions, because until the first hour or so had elapsed, I really didn’t know whether I would finish in the allotted time or not.

Anyway, hopefully I passed, and if I can do exams under these conditions, maybe I can manage university exams – which is one of the questions this studying is meant to answer for me. My next maths exam will probably be in a few months time once I get through the rest of the year 12 book – at the moment I’m a bit stuck on some questions which require drawing graphs by hand – I can’t help wondering why I should bother to learn to do this by hand when I would assume that nowadays graphs are drawn using computer software.

Still, the sooner I get through the maths, the sooner I can enrol in physics, then chemistry, then biology – and then I can seriously look at university options – still around 2 years away, methinks.