June 2010, FP3:
Total time: 52 minutes.
Total raw mark: 74/75
Q1: Looks like the FP3 papers start off really easily. There was nothing to this. 2 minutes, full marks.
Q2: I'm guessing the boundaries were quite high, this was a nothing-to-it question as well. 2 minutes, full marks.
Q3: 8 marks playing around with C3 logs?
4 minutes, full marks.
Q4: Nice question, the font was tiny to read. Edexcel should really learn how to use LaTeX. 10 minutes, full marks. I spent about 4 minutes plugging it into my GDC to verify my answer and getting it wrong over and over again before I realised it was in degrees.
Q5: This was a bit disconcerting, it's the kind of thing that comes up on a C2 paper, not sure what it's doing on an FP3 paper...? 5 minutes, full marks.
Q6: Nice Matrices question, no tedious eigenvector finding. My eigenvalue algebra got a little messy so I restarted the question. Transformation was standard. 10 minutes, full marks.
Q7: First part was bog standard. Second was as well. Third took me a good while and three attempts before I gave up trying to use the intended method and spammed it with C4 vectors that worked surprisingly well till I realised I subtracted wrong and had to restart again. Then tried to be a smartarse and pulled out constants for my length vector.
15 minutes, lost a mark.
Q8: Just plain ugly but fairly standard, all you needed throughout the entire question was
sin2+cos2=1. Not much effort required apart from writing out the ugly algebra. 10 minutes, full marks.
Overall thoughts: Fairly standard paper, I'm not sure what UMS my marks corresponds to, but I'm guessing it's 98 because full UMS should have been full raw given the relative ease of the paper. My timings could have been better, need to knock it down to 45 minutes and stop making so many silly mistakes. Vectors/matrices/locus questions definitely seem to be my largest time sinks.