AQA Further Maths FP1 June 5th 2015

Lol. At one point I considered applying for Maths, but then I realised I don't like it as much as I thought. Chemistry is the best subject ever Beats maths any day.

On a more serious note, you don't really need super high UMS; anything >93% for Maths should be more than enough. They tend to give a lot of offers for Maths and let STEP reduce the numbers for them. But obviously aim for as high as you can! And I don't think having a low score in the odd module will matter too much.

I think they both went well enough, definitely. If the official markscheme is right I only dropped about one mark on FP4, and other than the tricky bit at the end of FP3 it went smoothly and judging from the overall reactions the grade boundaries for that paper will be pretty low!

Maths isn't really sufficient but I guess D1 is a stepping to D2 which, at least to me, is more interesting.
Will you be sitting the FP2 exam or are you just self studying?

I've heard a lot about the last question of FP3 being really hard!

I know, it's just that I want to leave myself some room for things like S1 and S2. I don't know why, but I find them a lot harder.

Yeah the written questions in stats trip me up and because the boundaries are relatively high, I'm losing potentially 5-10 UMS.

Yeah it was pretty awful, and it turns out both of the methods I tried were right, they just seemed too complicated so I stopped before finishing! Hopefully I left enough not crossed out to pick up a decent number of method marks, but it should be okay anyway.

Oh I hate when then happens in Maths - you try a correct method but it gets complicated so you end up assuming that it's wrong...

I'm in!

How are you finding FP1?

It's okay. I understand them and find past papers easy EXCEPT that 2014 paper which I did for mock. It was horrendous lol thankfully the boundary was very very low so I could get 100UMS but not looking forward to our paper tbh

The paper this year is going to be trickier than ever...
What did you find hard about June 2014? Was it the sum of the trig solutions and/or the conic sections at the end?
For the trig summation I had to model the two general solutions as functions, do quite a lot of algebra and then sum two series to get the answer XD. It took me 10 minutes...

They seem to have started making maths harder since last year
The entire paper was trickier than previous ones tbh. I usually only take less than 4 pages to do a paper but it took me 6 pages for the 2014 one lol
I quite liked the trig question where you had to realise it was an arithmetic series

Yep they have. Even modules like C1. Most people think that this year's WJEC C1 exam was extremely difficult!
Yeah it was a fairly tough paper and I do like it when they actually test your insight and problem-solving skills, even if only to a small extent.

I liked the 2014 paper, but I would be mentally damaged if I see it in my exam although I'd probably do fine
How did you find C1 and C2? Did you take them this year

Yeah I did the WJEC C1 and C2 exams. C1 was harder than it has ever been before, but that was to be expected. C2 was a fairly standard paper, maybe slightly harder. But the last question on both papers threw almost everyone for some reason. In C1 it was an optimisation problem for the length of a fence L on a farm (so you have to find dL/dx and d2L/dx2 etc.) and for C2 it was finding the ratio between the major and minor segments of a circle (where one segment had one colour of flowers and the other had another colour of flowers). So WJEC seemed to like land problems this year...

Can someone explain how to do this question please?

Verify that (root5 - i) is a root of the equation:

(2+i root5)z = 3z*

I know the answer will be simple, but not revised complex numbers in a while and my minds gone totally blank haha

Plug that into z and change the sign to + (the conjugate) then plug into z*