Difficulty of S2 relative to S1

I started S2 yesterday, it was mainly stuff about the poisson distribution.

Anyway, our teacher said that the module is infact alot easier than S1? I mean how on earth does that work?

Anybody able to offer their opinion?

Reply 1

Morbo

There's 2 types of difficulty: difficulty in terms of number of new concepts and difficulty in terms of complexity of concepts.

S1 has many concepts that are not complex if you listened at GCSE
S2 has fewer concepts, more complex than S1, but not hard if you listened in S1

Reply 2

gyrase

The logic behind it is simple. When a topic is first introduced, the foundations must be learnt. Once the basics of the topic is learnt, you can begin to explore the topic abit more and it is often simple because you understand the core of the topic, you can easily apply the basic concepts to learn the advanced. So S1 introduces probability, data representation, data analysis functions etc. then S2 goes on to introduce special functions to calculate probabilities.

Reply 3

Kolya

Worzo

I could not have put it any better :smile:

S2 has fewer topics and therefore normally takes less time, hence your teacher's proclamation, but if you do not have a firm understanding of some S1 topics then naturally you will find it difficult.