Getting an A* in A Level Maths

I do edexcel a level maths and having been at an A relatively throughout the year (except for a B in one test) I want to be able to hit an A*.
For a bit of context, in my school for a mock exam 70% is an A and 80-85% is an A*. My grades have been at 71%, 55%(the one I got a B in, grade bounderies lowered) and in my final end of year exam 75%. I would like to be hitting the 85% mark to fully guarantee an A*.
In my exam, I have been significantly trying to reduce silly mistakes and have only lost 2 marks in my end of year exam to this.
Can anyone give any tips tricks to get there?

I do edexcel a level maths and having been at an A relatively throughout the year (except for a B in one test) I want to be able to hit an A*.
For a bit of context, in my school for a mock exam 70% is an A and 80-85% is an A*. My grades have been at 71%, 55%(the one I got a B in, grade bounderies lowered) and in my final end of year exam 75%. I would like to be hitting the 85% mark to fully guarantee an A*.
In my exam, I have been significantly trying to reduce silly mistakes and have only lost 2 marks in my end of year exam to this.
Can anyone give any tips tricks to get there?

Where are you losing marks?

Hi, I also did A-level edexcel maths and with this subject I found the best way to revise is past papers. In this way you know exactly where you are losing marks and how much you are improving on these questions. I occasionally created cheat sheets for myself to remember formulae or how to do harder questions, but the way I saw improvement was doing papers and marking them using mark schemes. Noting down the examples where you went wrong helps for future reference too.
I don't know if you are using physicsandmathstutor.com but they are a great website with a lot of cheat sheets and past papers with mark schemes. Using the exam spec as a checklist to make sure you haven't missed anything off the syllabus is also great.
I hope this was helpful ?

For silly mistakes: Lost a mark for forgetting the +c on an integration question and for a Binomial expansion, I forgot to multiply numbers together in an equation.

I got 3/4 of the marks in the paper, mostly because all the questions for most topics are repetitive and I've done practice questions similar to them.

The 1/4 of the paper I didn't get the marks, was due to: not enough time, very wordy questions, wasn't sure how to go about the question. They were mostly modelling questions.

I do edexcel a level maths and having been at an A relatively throughout the year (except for a B in one test) I want to be able to hit an A*.
For a bit of context, in my school for a mock exam 70% is an A and 80-85% is an A*. My grades have been at 71%, 55%(the one I got a B in, grade bounderies lowered) and in my final end of year exam 75%. I would like to be hitting the 85% mark to fully guarantee an A*.
In my exam, I have been significantly trying to reduce silly mistakes and have only lost 2 marks in my end of year exam to this.
Can anyone give any tips tricks to get there?

Which websites are you using?

For me, whenever doing practice questions or past papers I would make a note of questions I found difficult, made mistakes on or frequently saw. Then created a mini folder/book, so that when revising and before exams I could easily refer to and remind myself on things to be aware of and to avoid in the exam.

I also sometimes annotate my working in different colours when marking. One colour that has corrections and ticks, and another that comments my thought process for that mistake so when it comes up again in an exam it's easier to remember what went wrong and avoid it happening again because I thought about why I made that silly mistake as opposed to just writing the correct method. Sometimes this involved writing messages like "wtf?? typed stuff into the calculator wrong!", but for the most part I found it pretty insightful.

Check out: https://alevelmathsrevision.com/maths-categorised-exam-questions/ (they also do full past papers)

Hope this helps!

Only physics maths tutor

Look at Dr Frost here: https://www.drfrostmaths.com/sow.php?year=A%20Level%202017&term=Main

and here: https://www.drfrostmaths.com/sow.php?year=Full%20Coverage%20Revision%20Worksheets&term=A%20Level

TLMaths and MathsMadeEasy are also worth a look.

Edexcel also produce loads of additional material which your teacher can access so ask for these resources too.

I do edexcel a level maths and having been at an A relatively throughout the year (except for a B in one test) I want to be able to hit an A*.
For a bit of context, in my school for a mock exam 70% is an A and 80-85% is an A*. My grades have been at 71%, 55%(the one I got a B in, grade bounderies lowered) and in my final end of year exam 75%. I would like to be hitting the 85% mark to fully guarantee an A*.
In my exam, I have been significantly trying to reduce silly mistakes and have only lost 2 marks in my end of year exam to this.
Can anyone give any tips tricks to get there?

Heya! I did a-level maths as well I used to make lots of silly mistakes as well like forgetting to put +c or forgetting - at the end. What helped me was just doing tons of past papers by topic. My maths tutor would first have me do a mock. He would then mark it and point out mistakes I've made and go through them with me in detail. Then he just give these heavy past paper booklets each one being its own topic and he had me go through them. I would do around 5-15 question per day on a specific topic ( I enjoyed doing maths so it wasn't a bother for me). Then he would harshly mark me and then have me do more past papers until I got the hang of it. All questions are usually very repetitive and you'll learn to see the pattern. In the end, it did help me and I even scored a 92% in the actual exam from 70% in the mocks!

By doing tons of past papers, I was also able to remember common mistakes I made in the past and made sure I would check my common mistakes first when I look through my answer just to quickly check them before moving on.

Hope this helps and good luck!
Milena G.
UCL PFE
Study Mind

In conjunction with past papers, try using ExamSolutions.

https://www.examsolutions.net/a-level-maths/edexcel/

They make video tutorials for topics and some past paper questions, which are easier to decipher than mark schemes.

Have you also looked at the old past papers? They are less sophisticated than the new papers, as there is less overlap between topics on individual parts of questions, making them good for identifying weak topics, but less effective for revision immediately before an exam. You should also note that some topics have shuffled around. A lot of material has been moved from AS/year 12 to A2 (radians, trapezium rule, moments, friction, normal distribution…) and some content has been moved to further maths (volumes of revolution, vector equations of lines, momentum and impulse, expectation algebra …)

Honestly, in addition to doing tons of past papers as quite a lot of posters here have told you already, I guess the only thing that would make sense would be trying to find a way to double-check or even triple check your answers. This could be just doing the question again, or thinking outside the box.

Also, from experience, getting that A* comes from your ability to have some sort of knowledge in maths generally. For example, there are certain rules you should know and why, and how certain topics can test these rules. Theres a lot of knowledge crossing in maths, so ensure you actually understand the topics and don’t rely on route memorisation.

To get better understanding on topics I highly recommend TLMaths. Check out his YouTube, it will take you to advance level. I got A* from this. Hope this helped in some way.

Thanks! I really needed another revision website for maths and the colour idea for different reasons of losing a mark or gaining sounds like a good idea. But, I'll definitely make a 'cheat sheet' on things to remember and hardest questions in a topic.