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Getting to Cambridge: STEP by STEP!

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Reply 1940

Just did STEP III 2010.

Time 3 hours.
Mark: 95.

Thoughts: ****. I'm ****. Paper is ****. STEP is hard. :frown:

Q1: Started with this and churned out a full after 23(!) minutes.
Q2: Lol. Spent 35 minutes on this to get about ~6/7 marks.
Q3: Not a bad question. 20 minutes for 17 marks.
Q4: Lol. What the actual heck is this; I still don't understand what's going on after looking at the solution.
Q7: Not a bad question. 20 minutes for 18/19 marks; was being dumb for the very last part of the question about degrees.
Q8: This was quite cool actually, took me 30 minutes (which is just scandalous) for 16/17 marks.
Q12: Bleh; spent 40 minutes on this, the last part was really annoying but managed to scrape 17 marks or so.

All in all, I'm gonna have to work much harder from now on, maths is hard.

Reply 1941

SaadKaleem

Original post by Zacken

Just did STEP III 2010.

Time 3 hours.
Mark: 95.
--

Quite good for a Step III paper, keep it up! :smile:

Hows Physics going along?

Reply 1942

username1162972

Original post by Zacken

Just did STEP III 2010.

Time 3 hours.
Mark: 95.

Thoughts: ****. I'm ****. Paper is ****. STEP is hard. :frown:

Q4 was really easy for me, One would think that Q3 is much harder
Dw this paper is either brilliant or crap. Still got an S though so don't be too down.

Posted from TSR Mobile

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 1943

Zacken

Original post by SaadKaleem

Quite good for a Step III paper, keep it up! :smile:

Hows Physics going along?

Thanks.

Horribly.

How's your revision going along?

Reply 1944

Zacken

Original post by physicsmaths

Q4 was really easy, One would think that Q3 is much harder

I literally don't understand Q4. :erm:

Q3 was a walk in the park, though.

Reply 1945

username1162972

Original post by Zacken

I literally don't understand Q4. :erm:

Q3 was a walk in the park, though.

Just stare at it, it is just iff conditions again.
Have you done stuff on cyclotomic polynomials before? If not well done!

Reply 1946

Zacken

Original post by physicsmaths

Just stare at it, it is just iff conditions again.
Have you done stuff on cyclotomic polynomials before? If not well done!

Nah, I've heard of them briefly but never really looked into them. I think I just do well on the sort of questions that are "here's some new maths, have fun!".

For Q4, where do they get x(x^2 + ax + b) + x^2 + (q-b)x + r = 0 from?

Reply 1947

SaadKaleem

Original post by Zacken

Thanks.

Horribly.

How's your revision going along?

Appearing for C34/M1 only, it's going great.

I studied some topics from A2 physics, a bit it's alright.

Hows past papers for Unit 4/5 going along?

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 1948

IrrationalRoot

Original post by Zacken

For Q4, where do they get x(x^2 + ax + b) + x^2 + (q-b)x + r = 0 from?

Well it's just the required expression rewritten in terms of the quadratics with the common root. Since this roots is a root of both quadratics it's also a root of the expression x(x^2 + ax + b) + x^2 + (q-b)x + r.

Reply 1949

IrrationalRoot

Original post by physicsmaths

Q4 was really easy for me, One would think that Q3 is much harder
Dw this paper is either brilliant or crap. Still got an S though so don't be too down.

Posted from TSR Mobile

Q3 much harder? Which part was hard?? I thought it was the nicest/second nicest of the paper...
Q4 was a little trickier but Q3 was a walk in the park as Zacken said.

Reply 1950

username1162972

Original post by IrrationalRoot

Q3 much harder? Which part was hard?? I thought it was the nicest/second nicest of the paper...
Q4 was a little trickier but Q3 was a walk in the park as Zacken said.

People would feel like it is harder by the nature of the question as a whole on Prinitive roots. I think it is fine others would not.

Posted from TSR Mobile

Reply 1951

Zacken

STEP II, 2011:

Time: 3 hours (and a few minutes oops)
Mark:

General thoughts: this was certainly an interesting whereby I struggled to complete 3 questions in the first hour and a half and then did 5 questions in the next hour and a half... I'm fairly pleased with this one overall, though.

Q1: Nice little full in 20(!) minutes. I could have cut the time down but bleh, it's okay.
Q2: 40 minutes... the last parts just weren't clicking for me. Finally got it and got a nice sweet 19.
Q3: Blah; 20 minutes for 12 marks. Not worth it. It looked simple at the get go but that was deceiving (in my opinion)

Anyways, I was really stressing out at this point.

Q6: I sat there for 10 minutes starting at the initial result and a page of wasted algebra before tearing the page out and spamming out the (full) solution in the next ten minutes.

Q7: Moved on to this, spammed another full out in 15/20 minutes.

Q9: This was actually really nice! I didn't bother justifying the final inequality very much because I wanted to steam through as many questions as I could.

Q12: I really need to learn the "recursive" way of doing this sort of questions instead of flapping around geometric series everywhere. 18-19/20 for some lack of justification on my part.

Q13: This was really ugly but free marks; didn't bother with the final inequality - 17/20.

I'll need to finish off Q10 and Q8 if I can; but otherwise, gotta do some physics papers tonight...

Reply 1952

Zacken

S3, June 2013 (RE):

Total time: 40 minutes
Total mark: 73

General thoughts: Rushed through this one a bit since there weren't any of the usual time drainers (manually ranking spearman, goodness of fit, and a very simple contingency table instead of a complicated one) but overall this was a really interesting and thought provoking paper - there were some new sorta questions.

Q1: 3 mark crap on stratified sampling, I'm getting better at these sampling crap.
Q2: Simple "find the # of samples for this width of CI, etc...". Banged it out in less than 2 minutes.
Q3: Nice spearman where half of the data was already ranked - annoying that I forgot about the relevance of the PMCC and dropped a mark.
Q4: This sorta stuff was new to me and hence really cool to do - I liked it.
Q5: Normal CI stuff.
Q6: Pretty cool and new! I liked this but dropped a mark for not writing down the things where they were meant to be.
Q7: Boring 'ol "compare two distribution".
Q8: I like this sorta stuff, spent about 5 minutes to get the free 17 marks (at the end of the paper, no less!).

Reminder: read the examiner report for this in the morning - for now, it's sleep.

Reply 1953

Louisb19

Original post by Zacken

I literally don't understand Q4. :erm:

Q3 was a walk in the park, though.

When I did that paper I found Q4 a walk in the part but I didn't understand Q3.

Complex numbers are my weakness.

Reply 1954

Zacken

Original post by Louisb19

When I did that paper I found Q4 a walk in the part but I didn't understand Q3.

Complex numbers are my weakness.

They are mine as well, but that question had very little to do with complex numbers and was just understanding their given definitions.

BTW, you never replied to my post yesterday about III 2005?

Reply 1955

Louisb19

Original post by Zacken

They are mine as well, but that question had very little to do with complex numbers and was just understanding their given definitions.

BTW, you never replied to my post yesterday about III 2005?

Maybe ill give that question another go later.

And yeah your solution was correct, for some reason I didn't think about simplifying into

u

and

\dfrac{d}{u}

.

Thanks for the help!

Reply 1956

Ayahhh

Omg your story is really interesting... 7A* and 1A is perfect - even here in the Middle East
Now that you teach yourself, do you learn everything out of your textbooks, by watching videos or..?

Reply 1957

Zacken

Original post by Ayahhh

Omg your story is really interesting... 7A* and 1A is perfect - even here in the Middle East
Now that you teach yourself, do you learn everything out of your textbooks, by watching videos or..?