Someone who has done P3

I need a general idea about the rank order of difficulty for all the covered topics.

I am not pretending to have the dedication or time to lock myself up in summer and do all the crap in book, but I am going to make a dent.

Please could you rank the chapters starting with easiest and ending with hardest (as ill leave this till we go over it in class).

Thanks for your opinions and help.

-Rob

Reply 1

Fluffstar

Well I'm probably a good person to ask seeing as I struggled with practically all of it :rolleyes:

Hard Stuff:
1. Integration methods (for those who did not do further maths)
2. Rearranging Trig. and proving functions with Trig. identities (including differentiating and integrating)
3. ...The rest of the Trig. stuff :smile:

4. Vectors (personal thing...really didn't get along with them)

Easy Stuff:
1. Product Rule
2. Binomial Expansion (just take it very slowly because its real easy to make mistakes and then fook up the rest of the expansion)
3. Partial Fractions (unless they link it with an Integration to be really mean :smile:

)
4. Parametrics
5. Circles (giveaway marks!! really!)

The rest of it is just kind of medium...but it is highly subjective. Some people really get along with algebra and trig and find circles hard, it's just how you work. Anyway, that's my summary.

Reply 2

RobbieC

Seems to me you did OCR, I forgot to mention that I'm on Edexel! Lol

Anyone who has done edexel P3, a little advice??

Reply 3

Squishy

Since I went into last year's P3 exam not having even studied half the topics, I can tell you which ones I found the hardest, but it will be biased. :smile:

EASIEST ---> HARDEST

Chapter 1: It's all easy...just memorise the forms that partial fractions can take, and the expansion of the binomial series.

Chapter 3: The circle stuff, like Fluffstar said, is really easy. It's just an extension of P1 coordinate geometry. However you will have to learn implicit differentiation (page 51 onwards) before you can understand some of it. Sketching curves is fine if you can learn to think systematically about the way certain curves must look.

Chapter 2: Learn the rules of differentiation and apply them. Nothing thrilling. There are a fair few standard formulae to learn though...it's well worth memorising them however. You don't want to have to rely on the formula booklet in the exams.

Chapter 5: Some stuff like the modulus of vectors and so on are pretty obvious and you should've covered them in M1 already. However there are a few bits you just need to practise and learn to visualise quickly.

Chapter 4: Practise, practise, practise...all I can say. You need to bring some knowledge of partial fractions and differentiation into this chapter, so I might recommend doing this after Chapters 1 and 2 while they're still fresh in your mind. However I think it is the hardest because it needs the most work.

To be honest, I'd recommend doing the chapters in order. You may find that some chapters are harder or easier than others, but there is a reason why they put them in that order...you will need some knowledge from earlier chapters to complete later ones.