2013 STEP thread mark II

To be honest though I don't think the play off matters so much as I don't believe any exam board holds any big advantage over others in terms of uni admissions. This is off-topic, but which exam board would you choose? If I was in the position of choosing an exam board I think I would choose Edexcel every time. The resources are far better than for any other board, there is AFM to stretch the stronger candidates and it feels like the exams are being toughened up a bit recently (All of the ones I sat this session (C4, FP2, FP3, M4, M5, S3, S4) barring FP2 felt more difficult than average in my opinion).

do you mean this summer or summer next year?

this summer- it will make life easier- take breaks from it if you get bored

is that what you did?

In case anyone wants something to think about, I've just posted a claim that a STEP paper question is wrong.

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?p=43561377#post43561377

I have a method which i'll post later. It's a first principals method so I don't know how it'll hold up.

If you are working from first principals, I'm sure we'll agree. You only get the "required answer" if you apply the theorem that looks like Newton's Law for a body of varying mass (but isn't), without checking that all its conditions apply.

I'm guessing you're talking about using the product rule on mv?

The DOS at the college I have my offer told me that an S in STEP I wouldn't be worth much because they design it to be a grade and a half easier!

No, I don't think that the rate of change of mv is relevant - that's my point.

If that's the aim, I'm not sure they always achieve it. Discounting questions that I know I can't do because they require statistics theory beyond S1*, I think that the hardest STEP question ever was 2001 STEP 1 Q1. I don't find any of the published proofs really convincing. (Not even Siklos's.) I've got a couple of proofs that convince me, but might not be to other people's taste. They are very long, and took ages to develop.

The only really nice proof I've ever seen was given to me by one of my students, who got it from an unnamed friend in Sweden.

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*and those which I can't do because they are impossible - see discussion above!

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Hmm, it is a bit of a fiddly one, doesn't seem too difficult though, the problem can be simplified a bit by using symmetries etc..

But, either way, if they weren't expecting rigour, what they actually expected wouldn't've been that great

I keep getting their answer. I'll be intrigued to see what's wrong.

What form of Newton's Law are you using? What do you say the resultant external force is equal to?

I don't know, because MEI is quite obviously harder whilst AQA seems a tad easier. I have to agree though, I'd still choose Edexcel even though the AFM for MEI looks quite tasty. I've just blocked out all of my exams now, I can't really remember the questions on any of them and I think that's for the better.

Err, how do Warwick find out my STEP results?
Just wondering how the universities get hold of the information. (Not just for Step, a levels too.)

To add (a little bit late) to the discussion about running maths and fmaths parallel or one after the other, personally I did them one after another (state school/college, although we didn't have the small classes some of you had, I think we had 3 or 4 classes of 15-20 in each year group for "double maths"). I think my college ran it this way so that people who struggled with A2 maths didn't get stuck doing A2 further. Besides, I think it makes sense to do A2 maths before fmaths, I think its an easier way to pick it up, and some of the maths stuff gets used in maths anyway.