Official Edexcel S3 thread Wednesday 20 May 2015 Morning [6691]

I thought it was the hardest Statistics paper I have seen I thought that it made Statistics as hard as it should be for a unit 3 module, where as most of the past papers were easy.The last question had me stumped for a bit and never before I have I seen a question where you had to use first principles in a calculation(usually its just to proof standard results).I thought the confidence interval one was nas as the first part was only 3 marks and you had to unravel it to get the mean of the sample and the standard deviation/square root n and then do the test(although thinking about it I think there was probably a much easier method by using the confidence interval).I am concerned about how they will mark the written bits though(what were you were supposed to write for the discussion on the standard error of the mean? I said it should be higher for staff and children than for staff or children as that takes into account both variances and variances add) as they are worth quite a lot on S3.I wasn't expecting to have to subtract areas on S3(I did it wrong initially and only did the area of one circle instead of the difference).

I do think grade boundaries will be significantly lower as it broke the trend that Statistics is supposed to be easy and was a challenging paper but I did manage to do the paper(timing was quite an issue though I only got to check through up to the start of question 5) and further maths grade boundaries are often higher than they ought to be because the students doing them are very good at maths and can handle virtually everything thrown at them(unless they bring out STEP questions) I do however think A-55 B-48 that is my prediction for the grade boundaries.

I found M3 much harder but it was a typical paper(unlike the unusual statistics paper, though with diagrams and angles not identified making the calculations difficult for someone who doesn't much spacial awareness) so grade boundaries will probably be about low 60s for an A(I predict A-62 B-56) but timing was a major problem with that paper as they asked for integration by parts and trapezium rule both of which consume a lot of time and I barely gave an answer for the last part of question 7 (only had time to write to one significant figure it was that tight my answer was wrong though).

Will be surprising or less surprising?
Also ehat do you think about M2 and S2

This is my breakdown of the paper, with marks I lost (and I think some others also will) marked with square brackets at the end.

Q1 Bog standard, except maybe less generous for the Spearman (they usually give 5 or 6 marks)

Q2 They're more generous for the hypothesis test (8 marks), but part B could cause problems. Then again, you'd probably still get one mark for mentioning CLT I think. [-1]

Q3 Standard again but part D will cause some problems. [-2]

Q4 Part A: WTF? You'd probably still get a B1 mark for H0: Mu=0.5, H1 Mu=/= 0.5. Part B: Now whether you start part B with 0.5 or the average of the interval they gave you first, I don't know, but similar has been asked before, and ECF method marks would probably still be available even if you used the wrong values. [-2 for part A, maybe -2 for part B]

Q5: Part i was standard and part ii (a, b) were fine, but C and D would be a complete disaster if you've only relied on past papers practice because this was never tested before [-7, doubt you'd get more than 1 method mark for part D if you had no idea what you're doing]

Q6: You're done if you didn't understand that it was uniform but I suppose most of you figured it out by logic. Otherwise the rest of the question should be fine provided you still remember how to do an area of a circle.

So according to my mistakes I lost 14 marks to bring it down to 61. I really hope it's below 60 for an A, although I don't think any S3 paper has gone that low before.

Ppl, you can't use your s3 to cash in on the normal maths a level right? Has to be further maths? Cheers


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Only possible combinations for normal maths are either two of M1, S1, D1 or both the 1 and the 2 from the same M, S or D syllabus. S3 can't be in normal maths.

This is why it is so important to do
C3 and C4 at AS which are A2 modules
and achieve above 90 UMS so you get an early A star at AS
As most offers are based on
A*AA
Once you have that in the bag it is so easy to get 2 A's

This is why it is so important to do
C3 and C4 at AS which are A2 modules
and achieve above 90 UMS so you get an early A star at AS
As most offers are based on
A*AA
Once you have that in the bag it is so easy to get 2 A's

Worst possible advice unless you're at a private school.

Majority of state schools have a policy to cash it in, so uni's discard the A* and make you get another. Effectively A*A*AA offer.. That's what they've done to me, making what should've been an easy offer very stressful.


Posted from TSR Mobile

If they don't cash it in does the A* still count?


Posted from TSR Mobile

Yeah because it'll be cashed in after year 13 instead.


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Can any one give me the link to Solomon paper C?
Can't find it anywhere.

The exam is over why do you want it?

Probably an early prepared for next year - if 2016's exam was as hard as this you better start revising now! DM
me your email I'll send it through


Posted from TSR Mobile

Nah this year's paper wasn't hard. It was straight up unfair and unbalanced. They probably got a Newby to write the exam. half of the marks were on the last 2 questions, and more than 10 of the available marks were discussion based. Hence it was simply a "hard" unfair paper. No amount of prep could have helped. It was simply a case of luck on the day. ( I finished every single s3 question ever produced and still got rekt by that paper).