Bingo - I self taught Edexcel IGCSE Further Pure Maths. It was a last-minute decision so I had to rush for my exams, not really the most ideal exams I would like...There are some C3&4 stuff involved, mainly differentiation/integration and vectors.
Yeah, I was kinda surprised when I walked into a classroom and saw my maths teacher teaching the product rule (C3 work) to a bunch of small kids.
But you didn't do the usual maths but rather took the FP one? Well, you could have easily gained the extra A*. And if you took Maths A, with your skills, I'm sure you could easily get the first in the world award [by just getting 100 in each of the two papers, which is really a piece of cake compared to the FP papers]
Yeah, I was kinda surprised when I walked into a classroom and saw my maths teacher teaching the product rule (C3 work) to a bunch of small kids.
But you didn't do the usual maths but rather took the FP one? Well, you could have easily gained the extra A*. And if you took Maths A, with your skills, I'm sure you could easily get the first in the world award [by just getting 100 in each of the two papers, which is really a piece of cake compared to the FP papers]
I did the regular maths with CIE. It's really no use doing another maths GCSE, is it? I know I could have achieved higher marks with Edexcel A but with CIE it didn't go badly either.
I did the regular maths with CIE. It's really no use doing another maths GCSE, is it? I know I could have achieved higher marks with Edexcel A but with CIE it didn't go badly either.
1) The two CIE IGCSE maths papers I did were definitely harder than Edexcel's. Also the grade boundaries are higher. For Edexcel IGCSE you normally need no more than 85% for an A* but for CIE you need around 90% or higher
2) I only did maths with CIE because my teacher thought Edexcel wasn't challenging enough... I did enjoy solving more demanding problems, but it would be much easier to get an A* with Edexcel so I'm feeling a bit...weird.
3) If you don't enjoy coursework and are an international student it may be a good idea to go for CIE. Also if you want more challenging stuff. (It may not be the case with humanities though.)
I think history IGCSE is much harder than any exam board from what I've seen (I did CIE for real exam but actually tried OCR and AQA papers), if you don't consider the repeated question.
For sciences, we used textbooks for GCSEs triple sciences but despite doing double award, the detail was lacking and we had to buy new books specifically made for CIE. The question difficulty is not something I'm aware of, but CIE has more details and this makes the board difficulty a bit higher as you are made to spend more time going over the little extra details. However the repeating questions are ridiculous in sciences as well. Just do fricking exam papers and here it is, your A*
I don't know about other subjects. Well, I felt geography questions were a bit more creative this year so memorising case study appropriate for past questions didn't quite work out. Don't even ask me about literature because wtf, please, I've never been serious about it or will never be LOL. French seems to be harder than other boards due to the continuous writing paper
I think history IGCSE is much harder than any exam board from what I've seen (I did CIE for real exam but actually tried OCR and AQA papers), if you don't consider the repeated question.
For sciences, we used textbooks for GCSEs triple sciences but despite doing double award, the detail was lacking and we had to buy new books specifically made for CIE. The question difficulty is not something I'm aware of, but CIE has more details and this makes the board difficulty a bit higher as you are made to spend more time going over the little extra details. However the repeating questions are ridiculous in sciences as well. Just do fricking exam papers and here it is, your A*
I don't know about other subjects. Well, I felt geography questions were a bit more creative this year so memorising case study appropriate for past questions didn't quite work out. Don't even ask me about literature because wtf, please, I've never been serious about it or will never be LOL. French seems to be harder than other boards due to the continuous writing paper
I did OCR History and remember writing 11 pages in like 1.5 hours My friend did CIE English Lang&Lit and said it was easier than GCSE English but it might be just her. I don't really know because maths was the only subject I did with CIE
Yeah CIE sciences are definitely harder than other exam boards. I once used CIE physics textbook but then found out there was too much stuff I didn't need for my Edexcel exam
Literature... I always struggled with timing. In the actual exams I managed to write to a decent length but everything I wrote was complete blah