Are A*/A grades at GCSE and A levels enough

I was reading a question on another forum as to whether having top grades in Maths was enough to do well at degree level.

'Andy' (Maths Admissions Tutor at Nottingham Uni) said those grades only demonstrated a competency at the exams and did not indicate certain success at degree level.

He said that truly able mathematicians 'internalised' their maths - meaning that they could look at numbers and usually see the pattern immediately thereby facilitating the correct conclusion - amongst other things.

Would all you mathmos agree or disagree? Perhaps we could have the experience of those well into their maths degree courses already.

Reply 1

S@sha

yawn1

Top grades on their own won't take you anywhere. You actually have to be good at maths.

Reply 2

yawn1

Yannis

Top grades on their own won't take you anywhere. You actually have to be good at maths.

Obviously!

But I am trying to move away from the obvious and am asking whether members who are studying for a degree in Maths think that students who are 'good at Maths' - as determined by achieving top grades at GCSE/A levels - should be persuing it further at degree level or whether they struggle and end up with a lesser degree because they do not really have the cognizance for it.

Reply 3

S@sha

Once you get to university, grades are swept aside and it's a clean sheet. You can tell how good people are at maths. If you have what it takes, then you'll do well. The top grades at school can be achived by both those, who work really hard and just scrape them and those, who have the natural ability.

Reply 4

yawn1

Yannis

Agreed.

But what does one tell those who think that top grades in maths are the indicator for success at degree level, before they waste their time and money?

And do you think that many of them will get bad advice from their schools just because they have those top grades?

Reply 5

Jump

yawn1

It's upto the person, if you know you worked your ass off for an A then surely you would be sensible enough to not want to do the same thing for 3 more years (only harder material).

Reply 6

Gauss

im doin maths at imperial and to be fairly honest, a level grades (let alone gcse grades) dont come into the subject.

grades are jus a guide to help u decide wot u shud do (well hardly even dat!). if u naturally love any subject, u will always succeed in that subject.

although getting an A in a level maths or further maths will not mean u will get a 1st degree, but will surely help u understand the first two weeks! which is prob the most important part of uni, becoz if u fall back at da beginning, u will find it very hard to keep up through out ur time.

there is a big difference wid whom scrapes an A after working extremely hard, and the person who hardly works, comes naturally to him/her, and gets a comfortable A. the latter will succeed (to a certain extent)!

Reply 7

RichE

If someone got good A-level grades in their maths A-levels mainly by graft then I don't think a maths degree would be a good choice.

To be good at university level maths you both need to be able to argue well mathematically but, as 'Andy' said, it's also very much about internalizing highly abstract concepts particularly on the pure side. You need to develop a "gut feeling" for the theorems and definitions involved.

I think the best litmus test of this at A-level, besides getting good grades, is in how much of the big picture a student can see, or at least how many connections they can make for themselves. To a good mathematician parts of the syllabus will seem so similar that it hardly seems necessary to separate them notionally, whereas to a weak mathematician, who hasn't understood the topic sufficiently generally, then these will all be distinct bitty pieces of theory, that need to be separately learnt, and who will flounder if a similar question is asked of them, but which isn't precisely on their list of examples.

Informal practice at AEA type papers might help give a student a sense of how flexible their understanding is.