III, 2005: Total time: 3 hours
Total mark: 98/120
Overall thoughts: This was the crappiest paper I've done so far.
Was only able to get six (and 5 of them not even fully correct) solutions which is
very distressing. I'm getting dull. Time was not spent wisely at all; nor was question choice very good. I can usually spam four questions in the first hour but this time I was barely finishing my second question after the first hour mark; after some settling in things picked up, there was a nice gem of a question that I
loved. So silver lining.
Q1: Started with this. First few parts were easy, sketches took
ages. I reckon my justification was crap and the last sketch was just plain wrong, so 14/20 and 28 minutes. Horrid.
Q2: Easy question, didn't fully justify minima/maxima so cutting three marks here, 17/20 and 21 minutes.
Q7: I was getting scared because time was moving fast, so jumped ahead to Q7 here and spammed it out quickly; 16 minutes and 20/20 - I could see exactly what to do at each stage and it was an interesting concept as well.
Q5: Started this, the first few bits were standard enough - I spent twenty minutes and gathered about 10 marks, I reckon; but then gave up because the algebra got horrid and finished the rest off in the last 10 minutes of the mock, netting me about 17 marks in total.
Q4: This was a toughie, spent a good 35 minutes (started 10 minutes then gave up and came back and spent another 20 minutes at the end) on this one before cracking it open and realising I had to do a simultaneous induction; forgot a few conditions, left my answer in terms of
c and all in all scraped 13/20 here.
Q3: Bit of a standard concept; I was used to it, the conditions didn't take much work. Quadratic was easy to solve; a stupid slip up meant 17/20 in 20 minutes.
What's up next: Will need to try Q6 on this paper, it looks fairly nice, I might give Q8 a go as well, but I doubt I'll be able to get anywhere with it; I need to work on my horrendous pure skills given that I can't attempt anything in the applied sections in III - I don't know if I can scrape a 1 in this paper. On the bright side, a few others found this paper hard too (although they ended up scoring higher than I!) and the grade boundaries reflected this with an S being 80/120.