A great Mathematicians should be above...?

So, having typed that entire post, you still actually haven't tried any STEP III questions, you're just accepting your teacher's opinion?

I don't care how much harder your Greek maths is, no one finds STEP easy. I find AEA quite accessible but I've never met a mathematician yet who finds STEP easy before they're at university. And, quite frankly, you've got me interested now. How about scanning in a few of these supposedly incredibly difficult questions?

Personally I think you're talking absolute bull****. STEP is the entrance exam to Cambridge, the university that prides itself on offering one of the toughest maths courses in the world. There's no way Greek students have harder exams, otherwise tons of Greek students would be getting into Cambridge to do maths, and as far as I'm aware, they're not. Even the best mathematicians I know never found STEP easy when they were taking it, and that's not just my experience, that is the general consensus of everyone. Stephen Siklos, the person who sets the STEP papers, finds the odd question difficult - at an open day he told us he was stuck for hours on a problem that he himself had written a few years earlier.

Either you're some sort of prodigy, or, more likely, you're talking rubbish. For the whole of this arrogant post*, you didn't actually once even claim to have opened a STEP paper, just an AEA.

I don't think you can really argue your point without actually having seen Greek questions. I know that of some foreign countries have much higher standards than us e.g singapore. It is ridiculous in singapore. Their questions aren't so much repeating the technique that you learn over and over again but more to use what you have learnt and apply it to something else. There is that sort of thing because there is so much competition. Btw I'm not singaporean just had a singaporean teacher once. Anyway the person that said that they had never met anyone who had found STEP easier. I said in another post usually you find something difficult because there isn't something more difficult than it. When you have finished A-level, you think that GCSE is ridiculously easy because of the higher standards of A-level. When you first learn addition when you were like 4, you would probably thought that was difficult but now you know how ridiculously easy it was because you have encountered things that are more difficult. When you have found something more difficult than STEP then you would know eventually how easy it was. I bet when you finish a degree in Maths, you would find it easy because you have encountered stuff more difficult.

I don't think you can really argue your point without actually having seen Greek questions. I know that of some foreign countries have much higher standards than us e.g singapore. It is ridiculous in singapore. Their questions aren't so much repeating the technique that you learn over and over again but more to use what you have learnt and apply it to something else. There is that sort of thing because there is so much competition. Btw I'm not singaporean just had a singaporean teacher once. Anyway the person that said that they had never met anyone who had found STEP easier. I said in another post usually you find something difficult because there isn't something more difficult than it. When you have finished A-level, you think that GCSE is ridiculously easy because of the higher standards of A-level. When you first learn addition when you were like 4, you would probably thought that was difficult but now you know how ridiculously easy it was because you have encountered things that are more difficult. When you have found something more difficult than STEP then you would know eventually how easy it was. I bet when you finish a degree in Maths, you would find it easy because you have encountered stuff more difficult.

Ooooh dear...fine have it your way then. I've nothing more to say. There is no point in me senselessly arguying with you. You win!!.

*You call my post arrogant. OMG...Come on, there is nothing arrogant about my post I was just giving facts and replying back at what you said.

And yet none of this answered my main point at all. If Greek exams were so much harder than STEP, all sorts of Greek people would be flocking to Cambridge in their hundreds or even thousands. Anyway, I never said Greek exams weren't hard, I said STEP wasn't easy. And it's not. GCSE is easy, because whether you're bad at maths or not, it's repetition of techniques that you can familiarise yourself with by rote learning. STEP isn't. I'm sure there'll come a point when I'll find STEP easy, but it still won't be easy.

I called your post arrogant because you were dismissing Cambridge's entrance exam as easy, which is laughable, not least because it prides itself on the rigour of its maths course and on providing one of the best maths courses in the world. Anyway, I asked to see some of this Greek maths.Any chance of that?

I never dismissed the fact that Cambridge is the world's pretigeous university.
I just said that STEP isn't as difficult as you guys make it sound.

I'll be meeting my Maths teacher for whatever reasons (you don't want to know) sometime next week. I'll borrow his book (the translated one...lol) and give you what you want. I'm not promising you anything but I'll do my best .

I do know that. I still refuse to believe a standard A-level equivalent exam is more difficult than STEP. A-level is nothing compared to STEP, and if Greek A-levels are ten times as hard as ours they'll still be nothing. Most maths candidates simply could not cope with that.


But if the Greek exam is harder than STEP, and STEP is easy, then they're all more than ready to study at Cambridge. I am reminded of DFranklin, a Cambridge graduate, who stated most of the Cambridge Tripos exams were around STEP II difficulty, just more advanced material.

a few posts back you said he gave you the book.

Would you say that loads of people can handle the content but there are people who can do it better than others? Which is the point I am making. Singapore exams are way harder. I looked at year 6 text book which was my uncle's, that had stuff like loci and the sort of algebra you get in C1 which obviously hard but is obviously a high standard for people in year.

Yes and I forgot to mention that I was doing them in class (he just gives it to me during every maths lessons). The book he gave me for keeps was the 1960's-1980's. Unless you want that.

Like I said I'll meet him sometime next week and try and borrow his book again. And I'll repeat again I'm not promising anything but I'll do my best to provide you what you want.

Yes and I forgot to mention that I was doing them in class (he just gives it to me during every maths lessons). The book he gave me for keeps was the 1960's-1980's. Unless you want that.
Like I said I'll meet him sometime next week and try and borrow his book again. And I'll repeat again I'm not promising anything but I'll do my best to provide you what you want.

It's not the actual syllabus I'm talking about. I'm sure you know the STEP syllabus is practically identical to the A-level syllabus. But there's a difference between year 6/C1 and A-level/STEP. C1 is more mindless rubbish - memorising a few loci (parabola and circle), couple of results about what happens when, learning how to do algebra... true, it's incredibly advanced for that age, but it's not difficult in that, if you wanted to, you could go through the whole thing blind not understanding a word, just learning all the content and spewing it back out at relevant points. To an extent you can do this in further maths too. The questions are all predictable, even if there's the odd difficult topic, the odd integral where you have to think a bit; second order differential equations? Any 12-year-old could do 'em. Wouldn't know what the hell they meant, or why they were doing what they were doing, but they could do 'em. STEP genuinely makes you think and understand in a way that A-level (and even to an extent AEA) doesn't. Of course, there's harder than STEP; but I refuse to believe it's any A-level equivalent in any country, because it's not the material being learnt that's harder, it's the depth of understanding, mental dexterity and confidence in manipulation and trying novel ideas that you have to display.