ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE Mathematics => VCE Mathematics/Science/Technology => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE Mathematical Methods CAS => Topic started by: keltingmeith on June 19, 2014, 08:53:26 pm
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Howdy everyone, hope all is well!
So, recently I had the idea to write something I call "knowledge assessment questions" (incredibly creative title, I know :P ). Basically, it's going to be a booklet of questions I'm going to write myself for you all to use to help you with revision - NOT exam preparation.
These questions won't be exam style questions, and are certainly not questions I'd advice doing directly before an exam. I'm going to make them hard, and I'm going to make them tough. However, they will certainly be doable, and I would highly encourage doing them when you're not learning new material/not doing practice exams to make sure you really know you're stuff.
They're just going to be difficult questions to promote understanding, which I personally believe are one of the defining characteristics of the top students. I've attached a draft of what the booklet will contain for you all to look through and give feedback on (based on this feedback, I will or won't go through with the project). I'll also release future drafts when I finish future areas of study, as at this moment it only contains questions on polynomials and functions.
As previous stated - they're not exam style questions and aren't meant to prepare you for the exam, so I don't want feedback on things like, "this won't prepare me for my exam" - I want to know if you feel these questions are going to help you understand the material more, and think deeper about it and what some of this maths actually involves. Because, honestly, if VCAA asked any of these questions on an exam, I'm pretty sure a lot of schools would be in a huff. :P
Updates
19/06/2014 - First released, only some questions on functions and polynomials are available
20/06/2014 - Answers to the first update are now up.
21/06/2014 - I now have questions and answers for every topic in methods, and have included legal-mumbo-jumbo with my work to protect it. I will also no longer be reporting updates via posting in the thread
30/06/2014 - No new questions, but I have included a list of planned updates. This list isn't exhaustive, and each dot point may represent more than 1 question. If you have suggestions for more types of questions, either send me a message or post below.
09/07/2014 - I get really busy, hence explaining the late update. Anyway, this update will be done in two parts - the first part comes now, which features a quite possibly complete section on calculus in terms of questions. I don't have answers yet, which will come in the second part. I think I've got a question for everything I wanted to in terms of calculus, but if anything else pops up, I'll be sure to add it in and put into the comments if I think it's new. The layout will be different if you've already answered some questions - I've put them in a chronological order, so you're not going "first principles-->average value-->product rule-->area between curves".
(amendment: I may have forgotten a question I was meant to include, but it's all there now. Sorry guys!)
15/07/2014 - Probability and polynomials are (from what I think atm) done - sorry about the no solutions, but they're coming! I just really want to get all the questions done ASAP, so solutions might come in the final update (although I'd like to have solutions for the current set done by the end of the week, but we'll see if that actually happens...)
11/09/2014 - Upon realising I haven't updated this in 2 months, I'm putting the project on hold until I finish university, meaning that it won't be finished for this year's bunch. However, there's still a fair amount of questions from each section in there, so hopefully you'll all find what's up decent.
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Hey what's the answer to the last question?
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It's wrong to say that those are the only solutions - you see, when you divide by the x^2, you lose the solution x^2 = 0. That's why whenever you try to solve polynomials, you should factorise and apply the null factor law.
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Hey everyone, just a post to say that I've now updated the first post with answers for anyone that's had a look at the questions already. Once again, feedback on how you're finding them and if you think they're helping you is greatly appreciated!
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+1
Good source of questions for methods! (:
Have you considered making one for spesh? I think that's one subject that will benefit from questions requiring us to think outside the box.
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thank you euler
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Thanks guys! You've motivated me to keep going, hahah. Hopefully I can finish it up so there's a little bit of each topic by the end of the week.
I considered doing it for specialist, but specialist is a very hard topic to write for in terms of these kinds of questions.
In terms of relations, there's not much more to offer beyond methods, really the only things that spec adds is conics, weird asymptotes and reciprocals.
In terms of algebra, it's all complex numbers. This would possibly be useful, if the complex numbers on the exams weren't so predictable that I could write you up a question right now that would be identical to the one on the exam.
Then it's calculus, and in terms of what I'm writing right now for methods, they wouldn't be that much different... Minus what I could put in for DEs, but that doesn't make up that much of the course.
For vectors, specialist goes so far into them, while covering so little of linear algebra, I don't actually know what I'd be able to write about.
Then we get to mechanics, and all I could really do there is get you thinking about Newton and why he was kind of cool.
So, in short - for specialist, we'll see how I'm going. If I do get something done for specialist, I don't know if it'll be before I go back to uni (which is hopefully the plan for these ones at this stage), so by the time they are done, they may not be of any use to you.
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This is the last post I'll be making to report any updates - instead, I will be putting updates in the first post. I'm hoping to at least update weekly, so if you want to see something new, just check back once a week. The plan is to have this done by the end of July. I don't know how many questions I plan to have for each topic yet, I'll be setting goals later this week when I've looked at the study design a bit more in-depth. For now, it was just about getting a little bit of something out there for everyone to look at, use and give feedback on.
Speaking of feedback, keep it coming! Also, report any errors you've seen. I've found some myself, but I won't be able to catch all of them.
Finally - in the answers, you will find references to mathematics beyond the scope of methods. This is due to the nature of both what I aim to make you think about, but also the scope of your course (particularly for calculus, it's much easier to teach techniques than concepts). If you see something in there you find particularly interesting and want to know more about, send me a message and I'll be happy explain it in-depth to you!
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dam wish you wrote this before my analysis sac XD. But thank you anyway~
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It's actually all the analysis SACs that got me thinking to do this, I really wish I had done all this before the analysis SACs too, hahah.