Getting to Cambridge: STEP by STEP!

Unpopular opinion: I like D1

get off the thread

Sorry about that

It was going good right till the spoiler.

Sorry about that

I didn't quite get that... You saying graph theory sux?

Psh amateurs

D2 >>>>>(A lot of slashes later) d1


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dawn of dark: Results day, a day late.

soooo, yesterday was results day. Being on an island has its drawbacks, i hadn't received anything yesterday. I had no clue when they were coming and i resigned myself to a week long, at the very least, period of suspense and anxiety. So i was fairly pleased this morning when my mum casually dropped the fact that the exam centre had called her and told her that we could go pick it up.

Whilst my results were fairly underwhelming and a little lower than what i'd set myself as a target especially for fp1 and m3, i'm just plain disappointed with myself there.

On the brighter side, this is definitely going to spur me on to get myself in gear for june and ace fp2 and fp3, i shan't let myself get complacent as i did with fp1. I'm also fairly happy with my physics unit 3 mark, given that i though i'd ended up with 40/60.

What are my results, you ask?

congratulations

Thank you!

Thank you!

oi do the fp3 paper m8 want to see your reaction to a few questions

Halfway through writing my blog post/analysis about it.

Analysis:
74/75, 45 minutes. Very disappointed with this, maybe a little on the end to highlight your disappointment? And put it in orange in the OP

savage

...had to edit my post because of that.

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 $\sin^2 + \cos^2 = 1$. 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.