A* Grade Maths

180 or higher

Was the C3 paper really that hard?

As someone that does OCR maths the paper was difficult in some places, but all if it was answerable with knowledge I had from my syllabus, and I would assume would be on their syllabus.

All on the syllabus just unusual styled questions

How did your students find it?

Have to say I've been a bit mystified by some of the comments floating around social media on this - people even suggesting that some teachers struggled to do the exam - surely that can't be right?!

There are some poor teachers out there

Better ones found it challenging but acceptable
Weaker ones struggled to find anything they could try

That is the beast of it I think ... weaker ones were not able to show anything that they could do

They will enjoy this read:

http://www.edexcel.com/i-am-a/student/Pages/C3-FAQs.aspx

ps
I did the paper in 29 minutes 59 seconds...of course.

Not even questions 1 and 2? I thought they were pretty much bookwork given that questions like that are posted on TSR all the time!

How did your students find it?

I had a go on Saturday afternoon just because of all the furore - I haven't tried to sit a complete exam in timed conditions for 25 years(!) - and I think I would say it was challenging but fair.

I would expect a student who had mastered and understood the material to do well on it, and a weaker candidate to struggle but still pick up marks for standard manipulations. Surely this is exactly what you would want a well-designed exam to do?

(I didn't exactly make it easy for myself: the TV was on in the background; I kept going in search of chocolate; and I felt artificially pressured for time because I had other things to do, although in fact I reckon it took me just under an hour to complete. Also, I only had Arsey's commented paper to work from, so I was stupidly trying to copy the original questions down from a screen without glancing at the answers, THEN trying to do the actual question itself - needless to say I didn't even try writing out the last question! I made couple of stupid algebraic errors, which I corrected when checking my work; couldn't remember what you were supposed to say to justify the accuracy of the numerical approximation; and missed the "extra" solution on the graphical solution problem. Everything else seemed straightforward.)

Have to say I've been a bit mystified by some of the comments floating around social media on this - people even suggesting that some teachers struggled to do the exam - surely that can't be right?!

1&2 yes I agree

You see, #1 puzzled me. The rest of the paper was okay, but I ran out of time for the last part of 8 as I gaped at teh Q for too long.

Now I took less than a minute to do Q1 because I saw it literally as a "follow the procedure" question and it came out nicely.

On the other hand, Q8 had me worried about when I was going to use all the information in the question - the "trick" being that most of the information in the question was utterly irrelevant

Clearly I rounded up to the nearest quarter of an hour



The email sent to schools is pretty similar ... I know lots of teachers who teach the text book rather than understanding so these unusual questions might well fool them !

I thought the second response was more firm in its stance of Edexcel being right in their mind (Which I happen to agree with in the long term)

I think the Oxford book will become more popular with edexcel students/teachers with the blue flash questions in from now on.

Do you agree that C3/C4 should be taught at a much increased pace (mimicking the FM pace)? That way, topics can be be reviewed in greater detail with loads of variety of types of questions as opposed to finishing late and imploring students to blast papers.

I personally think (and this is my own view rather than that of any school I work for or have worked for) that students should take responsibility for learning outside the classroom and look to extend themselves.
True
My fear is the A level has become very formulaic, bitty and seen as discrete in terms of its learning.
Indeed. I'm a good example of this poor mentality. This is why I'm for the scrapping of Jan exams (though I think they should remain for resits) as there's no rush for learning content and topics could be covered it their entirety as opposed to learning it by module. For example: all of C3/C4 calculus throughout the yr.
Once GCSE are done, forget them
Surely people don't forget GCSE material?
Once C1/2 is done forget them etc etc
I guess... I think I've partially forgotten algebraic long division from C2
I think it should be far more joined up and A* grades awarded to those who score highly in papers that are never predictable.
More details on what you propose please
Im all for good students gaining top grades yet there needs to be something to really really make that top end hard to hit.
The amount of candidates getting As for Edexel maths is shockingly high!
With adequate support good students (not necessarily THE most able) can get there with some sideways thoughts on maths, not number plugging and throw away modules.
Just my 2p

Fair enough.

More details?
See my thread on the 100 things