How difficult would you consider the AFM modules to be?

That approach seems fine - I would personally switch D2 and FP2 but there you go. The order I did my modules was this (Bear in mind that Jan exams still happened then):

Jan 12:
- C1
- S1

Jun 12:
- C2
- D1
- FP1
- D2

Jan 13:
- M1 (self taught)
- M2 (self taught)
- M3 (self taught)
- C3
- S2

Jun 13:
- FP2
- FP3 (self taught)
- C4 (self taught)
- M4 (self taught)
- M5 (self taught)
- S3 (self taught)
- S4 (self taught)
- STEP I, II, III (self taught)

My personal approach was to do every question in the textbook, and then all of the normal+Solomon papers for exams, so what you are doing obviously sounds fine. I would be very careful using papers from other exam boards though - the syllabi for later modules can vary widely, and if you tried to do OCR S4 papers I think (for example) they include content on probability generating functions which you won't see in Edexcel.

I ended up working for pretty much the entirety of the day all the time except for Saturday and one weekday afternoon. I would do A Level work during the normal school hours, and STEP at home afterwards. It was a lot of hours spent retrospectively but I enjoyed it - plus I was doing 12 modules + 3 STEP papers, which means you should have less if you stick with your plan.

In my opinion M3 is where the difficulty in Mechanics becomes somewhat more apparent. M4 has one bad chapter (relative motion, which many people dislike due to how geometrical it is) but is otherwise not too bad. M5 is the hardest module in my opinion because I feel it expects a more fluent mathematical understanding of things - for example, a basic intuition of what integrals and derivatives actually are, rather than just how to calculate them. However M5 is in my opinion easily the most enjoyable module out of the 18 because of that sort of thing.



The first point is absolutely true but a qualification can hold more value than simply as a prerequisite to a university course - most people who do AFM do it because Maths is simply much more interesting to them than any other subject. In my view anything beyond Maths/Further/Physics is filler for a Maths application so you may as well choose the filler that's most palatable. As an aside though; whilst no university requests it (likely as it is simply not fair given that very few places actually teach it) I would be quite confident in saying that self-teaching it as a fourth looks very good on a Maths application.

I don't think it needs 3 years though - just careful ordering of them due to the requirements of each.

This is enlightening, you don't get this kind of advice in school..

Anyway I thought that you need one of FP2 or FP3 for the Further Maths A Level - please correct me if I am wrong.

I would prefer to have the two a level results in hand when I apply

D2 game theory would overlap with Economics so that is one thing to factor.

Also the Cambridge admissions tutor said that they prefer S3/FP3 instead of D2.

Dianna, on a side note..

What do you plan to study in cambridge?
What kind of job/career are you looking to do?

Can I inbox you, instead of getting carded for going off topic.

This is enlightening, you don't get this kind of advice in school..

Anyway I thought that you need one of FP2 or FP3 for the Further Maths A Level - please correct me if I am wrong.

I would prefer to have the two a level results in hand when I apply

D2 game theory would overlap with Economics so that is one thing to factor.

Also the Cambridge admissions tutor said that they prefer S3/FP3 instead of D2.

You do - and your order makes more sense when I consider that for other universities. Given that Cambridge gets you to submit all modular UMS as well as details of what other modules you are sitting, I don't think it would matter which one you did first for them as the admissions tutor will know you are doing all of them.

The problem is that out of the thousands (or maybe even tens of thousands, I don't know the precise statistic) of people doing Maths with Edexcel, less than 100 of those do the full 18 modules - my most recent evidence for this is that there were 59 entries in 2012 for M5 or something similar. The majority of schools will not have or had anyone doing the full 18 and even fewer have teachers capable of teaching them (in terms of familiarity with the modules, not ability) so information on it is scarce. I did not even know it existed until halfway through Y12; else I would have at least seriously considered doing it all along.

Yep, I have been told that it doesn't matter what modules you do whilst applying to uni to an extent.

I think its even less than that now since no jan exams, if teachers are incapable of helping me - seeing as some of them or so I have heard find it hard enough to teach to M3/FP3 then should they be math teachers? From your earlier post I assume that FP3/M3-M5 is more first year mathematics, so surely teachers should be capable of going this far.

Just to clarify though, the aforementioned modules in the OP when I sit them all should give me A Levels in both Maths and FM, right?