STEP Prep Thread 2020

Do we get to know our marks or do we just get given the grade?

I'm sure I got around 75 in STEP 3 which will likely be a 1.
I don't know if high 40s is enough for a 2 in STEP 2. I dropped 50 marks from my mock in year 12...

Idk the chances of getting in with a 2,1 but a 1,1 offer. The wait is killing me.

By "detailed looks at individual papers", what do you think they're actually looking for? Because my STEP 2 has 2 good solutions and a few partials but the maths just looks messy and desperate

I'm starting to panic about my partials. I'm thinking they won't give me as many marks as I predicted I would get. Especially in STEP 2, since I basically don't have any full answers.

I only had 1 full in step 2 so I may also be overestimating my fulls :/

I didn't even do any fulls, I had 2 questions that were near to full but the rest were very much partial.

I think many of us are in the same boat, and as far as boundaries are concerned we should probably actually be reassured that lots of people who usually get 3-6 fulls are getting 0-3 instead...

When will you guys get your results? Is it the same day as a-levels?

Can somebody rate my mark in STEP 2 (like give me lower bound/realistic/upper bound) cuz i've only just started to rethink the paper after all this time. I feel ok with STEP 3 cuz I think I got 4 fulls/2 decent partials but I only have 1-2 fulls in STEP 2. Only rly need to appraise q1,3,4,5,6,11 cuz q2/7 were minimal

q1) Did (i) and (ii) fully and then typod in (iii) so I couldn't get the answer and it was really early on. The substitution I suggested does work tho after some work
q2) did very little
q3) Did all of it but I couldn't get the second result in (ii) about u_r^2-u_(r-1) u_(r+1) and also I typod when doing algebra in the last part about when a=1-1/N so couldn't prove this either
q4) Did fully apart from didn't do (iii) (d)
q5) Did fully but did a dumb way tbh but hopefully markers just care about it being mathematically valid rather than beauty lol. I didn't quite do it fully tho I proved that the num of digits is <= 4 in the last part and found the solution but I didn't inspect the 4 digit case.
q6) This was pretty bad tbh. I did (i), messed up one direction in (ii), got the conditions slightly wrong in (iii), I think I said sth like detM=+/- 1 but really it's just det M = 1, found a valid matrix in (iii)
q7) made very small progress, like 3-5 marks worht lol
q11) did fully but gave little to no explanation for anything so how many E marks is standard on these sorts of questions? Still hoping for 15+ tbh

thanks guys good luck for results day

Of course I haven't seen your paper but surely this is definitely S grade I think, probably 80s for lower bound and 90s for realistic and upper?

No offence but some of you guys just need to realise "que sera sera".

I am sorry if this is a silly question but how will the universities access our results? How can they link the Metritests account to a candidate? Through mail or name maybe?

If this is the same as any other year (can't see why they wouldn't be) - they will be forwarded to universities automatically.

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that lots of people are saying "everyone found this the hardest ever paper" but there are still lots of people who think they got 70-80+ marks which is almost always a 1 in most years so is even more likely to be a 1 this year. What I'm worried about is that most people's idea of a "good paper" is 100+ marks so when they get 70s they think it went really badly despite not really being at risk of not getting a 1.