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Which is the best board for Math and FM?

My son wants to do M&FM next year. His school do CCEA for the single maths A level but don't offer FM. There is a local school that he could go to by taxi for individual classes who do FM but they do OCR so obviously he'll have to pick one board or the other for both maths and FM. The other alternative is to do what my older son did and self teach the FM and not bother with the taxiing around town but obviously that is extremely hard work, and there is no Maths Support Network in N Ireland.

CCEA have an extremely limited range of modules (C1-4, M1-4, S1-2, FP1-3) whereas OCR / AQA / Edexcel seem to have a much better range, not to mention actual syllabus textbooks as opposed to 'here's a list of topics, now hunt through 4 different maths books to find them' which is the CCEA approach! If we'd known that 2 years ago, there's no way oldest son would have been doing CCEA! Still haven't managed to track down all the bits of S2!

He wants to do Computer Science so a board with a Decision Maths module or two would probably be more relevant. The school are extremely flexible so I don't think they'll have a huge problem with him sitting in the CCEA classes but doing a different board for exams 'cause at least at C1-4 stage the courses are pretty similar, it's only at FM that they significantly diverge (we used Edexcel textbooks and mapped the CCEA syllabus from book to book for C and M)

Reply 1

Tomcrease

I am currently doing Edexcel maths and further maths and I can tell you that the only additional modules that it has are D1/2, M5 and S3/4. A lot of colleges don't run these modules anyway (M5 and S4), only specialist/public schools would usually run these. I have a friend who does OCR math (not further) at a different college, she still does the core modules. The content in the core modules does seem to be mostly the same with one difference. Her c3 seems to be my c4 and vice versa. So learning from 1 board and sitting another would be quite odd.

I wouldn't say there is ever a "best board" I think that any board that offers the modules you want/need is the one for you. The modules I am doing/done are C1-4, M1-4, FP1/2, S1 and D1. Although you say your son wants to do computer science at university and D1 would be helpful, I didn't find it very helpful. I did computing AS and from my understanding computer science is a lot like decision, but decision won't prepare you much more than other modules. Decision maths is also not to attractive to universities, it is often seen to be the easy option and doing mechanics or statistics may, not necessarily, help you in applications.

I don't know about other boards, but I would recommend Edexcel from my own experience. All the exams are incredibly easy and there is the vast range of modules. The text books are very good and the exams are very easy to 100%.

To sum up, if you find an exam board with the modules you want to do - sit that. It doesn't matter in the long run which you do.

Reply 2

alibee

The modules chosen as part of the A Level are not going to impact chances of admission. Most students don't even have a choice as these decisions are taken by their school on their behalf.

Reply 3

KittyKattyKaity

It's not really a choice based on uni entry as such, although that is a part of it. If he does F Maths through the school patnership agreement, the other school do Decision Maths as part of the FM so he wouldnt be able to do CCEA for Maths cause they don't offer DM so he'd have to do OCR regular maths from CCEA classes, or he'd do CCEA for both and self study the FM, or he'd do Edexcel / AQA and self study the lot while sitting in on regular classes (not my favourite option!)

CCEA is an extremely limited syllabus with only 13 modules to chose from and no official textbooks which makes self study extremely difficult as your. Ever absolutely sure that you've covered the correct bit of syllabus so you end up covering more than you need to just to be on the safe side. OCR at least has textbooks but AQA seems to be the better board in terms of resources and online support. I don't know that much about Edexcel cause our school hardly uses them, exams are 90% AQA with a few CCEA.