Edexcel FP2 Official 2016 Exam Thread - 8th June 2016

- write sine in its exponential form
- realise the integrand is the imaginary part of e^(2+i)x

Yep this is me, wanting a 100 in everything. I am confident so I don't get overly nervous but it happens from time to time.

At first i also sketched the graph and found the solution from there but i didnt know if that was correct since the question said to use algebra to solve the inequality.

Those two would be pretty impressive solutions. Why haven't I got that vision

It's weird because that is like I used to be - I never used to get nervous in exams but now that Cambridge has made me care a lot about UMS I've been shaking so badly!

Yep, which means that you can't directly use a graph to find your critical values. When they say "use algebra", it's perfectly acceptable to draw a graph AFTER you've found your critical values in an algebraic fashion. Number line works too.

I've seen mark schemes accepting both, we'll be fine!



Zacken is a bird of prey when it comes to spotting techniques.

I got 71.003 too, this is because the bound of the 7 cos x is pi/2 not pi. If you integrate between arccos(3/4) and pi you get 71.003 rather than 32.5.

Sorry if this has already been answered.

Summation was a little nonstandard in my opinion, having to spit the summation into three and then evaluate separately won't be intuitively obvious for everyone

It's weird because that is like I used to be - I never used to get nervous in exams but now that Cambridge has made me care a lot about UMS I've been shaking so badly!

Hopefully we'll get all marks in that question. In question 7 I made a sillly mistake and used z^n + z^-n = cosnθ rather than z^n + z^-n = 2cosnθ and so the first part of the question went wrong. Will I loose all the marks in the next part of the question, where we had to integrate cos^5θ?

That's completely normal. It's a great position to be in which puts pressure on you. Just try your best to treat it like another past paper

For me it's more TSR than any university

I was told that going on TSR would be bad, but your replies have reassured me loads so thank you I shall try - hopefully FP3, M2 and S2 will be more like the standard past papers than FP2 was, but even then I could still afford to get an A provided I get A*s in Biology and Physics (but I will definitely not take that risk!)

I was told that going on TSR would be bad, but your replies have reassured me loads so thank you I shall try - hopefully FP3, M2 and S2 will be more like the standard past papers than FP2 was, but even then I could still afford to get an A provided I get A*s in Biology and Physics (but I will definitely not take that risk!)

To be fair there were other methods you could consider as well:

- use a PI/CF method on the first order ODE
- differentiate and then use a PI/CF method on the resulting second order ODE
- write sine in its exponential form
- realise the integrand is the imaginary part of e^(2+i)x.
- double IBP

To be fair there were other methods you could consider as well:

- use a PI/CF method on the first order ODE
- differentiate and then use a PI/CF method on the resulting second order ODE
- write sine in its exponential form
- realise the integrand is the imaginary part of e^(2+i)x.
- double IBP

I'm so glad I've seen this (I was afraid of posting on the Cambridge offer holders thread around mathmos) because I too get nervous in exams and FP2 was no exception. I spent a good long time hyperventilating from question 4 and managed to finish the paper but did no way near as well as I could have done :-/

Am I right in thinking that the A* comes from the best 3 A2 modules? In which case since I got 100 in D2 last year I could get 85 in both S2 and M2 and still get an A*?