Maths: Statistics or Mechanics

They both bored me to tears.
Mechanics has to be taught well.
I can understand how some people could enjoy mechanics, but in my experience for the majority of people mechanics is a fate worse than death.

You're definitely right about needing it to be taught well. I found mechanics so much easier at college than I did at uni although it was essentially the same stuff (although I'd forgotten most of it lol when I went to uni)

Basically though most things can be solved fairly quickly with conservation of momentum or conservation of mechanical energy. Forces just need resolving usually and matching all the bits up. Its a case of practice, after stupid amounts of practice you tend to build up an inventory of methods more so than actually understanding the principles - but thats probably because A-level mechancis papers are usually very similar.

The principles were never an issue for me (until M3 where i was completely lost due to a lack of physics and a teacher who I can only presume presumed I had a knowledge of physics...you can't start teaching M3 SHM without first telling someone what the frig SHM is!!), the answers were just always wrong most frustrating thing in the world.

I did

C1, C2, C3, C4, S1, M1



Stats: get a random number, plug it into one of 5 equations and hope that the long string of numbers that comes out is right
Mech: bit of trig, bit of vectors, bit of GCSE physics

I'd recommend mechanics, even though I despised it more than stats.

That's what I'm doing.

If you can't do that OP, do mechanics, even more so if you're on OCR since their syllabus for S1 is ridiculous - permutations / combinations, need I say more?

That's what I'm doing.

If you can't do that OP, do mechanics, even more so if you're on OCR since their syllabus for S1 is ridiculous - permutations / combinations, need I say more?

this guy is a n00b

shut up you prick.

just do the one you find more interesting. Personally i preferred stats. I did the A-level maths under the old system (curriculum 2000) so had 3 pure and 3 applied modules, so did P1, P2 and P3, S1, S2 and M1.

I sat the AS in the same year that almost a third failed it! Probably because a lot of people did badly at P2 then. Bearing in mind that the content of the three pure modules then is now spread into 4 pure modules.

Butting in here sorry,

But is M2 harder than M1 and S2 harder than S1 because surely it'd then be easier for the whole A level to just do the one's

Butting in here sorry,

But is M2 harder than M1 and S2 harder than S1 because surely it'd then be easier for the whole A level to just do the one's

I'd say S2 was easier than S1 if you're reasonably OK with pure maths. A lot of it involves differentiation and integration when you deal with continuous probability distributions. Then hypothesis tests are just a case of learning the method. S2 isn't quite as bad as S1 in terms of learning formulae and plugging numbers in. So I'd say it was different as opposed to harder.

As for M2, I don't think there was a huge jump in the difficulty. Just have to differentite/integrate velocities etc. when dealing with non-constant acceleration questions. The rest I'd say was of similar difficulty to M1 and is just a natural extension of it. When you do M1 you're getting used to a whole new topic and area of maths whereas you've done some pure and some stats at GCSE - so M1 can be a bit of a pain while youre getting used to it, but M2 just builds on the foundations that you covered in M1.

I don't necessarily think M1 and S1 is that much easier than doing two modules in the same area - I doubt it'd be allowed as a combination if that was the case . But at the same time, they're both AS modules - so you'd have an A-level that was 2/3 AS work and 1/3 A2 work, so you could argue it being easier in that way perhaps. It depends where your strengths and interests lie though. The higher numbered modules just assume slightly more familiarity with the core maths.

jack off