I made a thread but it got pushed down, here are some tips for S1:
Here's some tips for S1:
- Make sure you understand the content. There's lots of people on here who've complained about the C1 and C2 exams, but the exams were good if you had a really good understanding of how it all worked and were able to add new things onto this (e.g. the price to clean the cylinder on C2, it was just an extra detail). Obviously don't look at things like normal distributions seriously indepth, just make sure you understand whats necessary.
- Check answers. Especially for things like a normal distribution backwards, it should give you a really similar answer. For regression equations, try inputting given values and see if the answer is similar to what they've given, does x correspond to y? If you get something extremely wrong, try checking over the working.
- Calculators are seriously useful. They aren't just for adding two numbers, they can do so much more. Our college suggested to get a certain Casio calculator ("silver calculator"
which has several different modes. One of these is a STAT mode (mode, 3) in which you can input data and calculate mean, standard deviation, and normal probabilities, amongst others. If you don't understand how and have one of these calculators, ask your teacher or find a manual (or ask me). Side note, if you are given sigmax, Sxy etc., you cant use this and have to calculate things like r, a and b manually, sucks doesn't it.
- Use the formula book. So what if you can remember an equation? There's still a small probability that you may use a + rather than a minus for the Sxx equation. Thats a ton of marks lost. You may forget to square just the sigmax and not the sigmax/n. More marks lost. Don't think you know it all.
Also, a lot of people seem to be completely relying on S1 to give them the marks, as the C1 and C2 papers were comparably hard to lesson work. I'm fine with that but my best advice is to look at past papers and gold papers, practice the routine for regression and correlation and make sure you can be open to new things, like coding in regression lines and conditional probability in normal distributions. Edexcel can easily mix and match topics and they clearly aren't afraid to do that.