STEP III, 2009:Time: 3 hours
Mark:
General thoughts: I
really, really liked this paper. Hence the one-off high-mark fluke. There were two limits questions, integration questions, induction/polynomial one, Laplace transforms, Fresnel integrals, all stuff that are unfamiliar to people and are, as such, made rather easy but due to my familiarity with those sort of things, I found it rather easy. Which is unfortunately, unlikely to happen in the real thing.
Q1: Started with this and even though it looked a little daunting, once I put pen to paper it came out within 20 minutes. Full.
Q3: Decided to do this once next because Q2 looked a little lengthy. This was an absolute gem, I could see exactly what I needed to do for each part and it all fell out within fifteen minutes. Full.
Q4: I kept putting Q2 off because all the other questions looked so
fun, especially this one. Again, it was pretty obvious what to do in each case and I squeezed a full out in 19 minutes.
Q2: Finally went back and got this done. It took fairly long and I reckon I didn't justify myself too well at the very end. So 19/20 in 24 minutes.
Q7: This one was fairly lengthy as well and I didn't do the very last bit about the degree of the polynomial which is apparently worth a fairly large amount of marks. So 15/20 in 25 minutes.
Q12: Now that I'd gotten 6 fulls I started relaxing my criterion for picking questions (I had an hour left on the clock), I spent about half an hour on this stats question which was quite interesting. I'm getting a hang of this PFG stuff.
Q5: Now that I'd gotten 7 fulls I started going through the pures again and attempted Q5. Not much to say about this, I scribbled out the horrid mess of algebra as quickly as I could and that was that.
I might have a chance of meeting my offer after all. Hopefully, gotta keep this up. I have a feeling my next mock is going to go downhill from here.