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March 29, 2024, 01:09:44 am

Author Topic: What’s with the increase in difficulty of the maths exams?  (Read 4335 times)  Share 

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schoolstudent115

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What’s with the increase in difficulty of the maths exams?
« on: April 19, 2021, 04:24:58 pm »
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I’ve often heard how methods exams and also spec exams have gotten a lot harder in the past few  years, and I’d have to agree.

I’m in year 12, but I pretty much pre-learned the whole course. So I’ve been looking at the past exams and tried picking the hardest questions from each. The  past 5-6 years have had some really tricky ones (quite visual), and some questions have an average mark of say 0.1/2.

I tried the 2006 spec exams and they are very easy compared to the recent ones. Both combined, I still managed to score 119/120. And just extrapolating, if I were to sit the recent exams, at this stage having not done revision, I’d definitely lose more than 1 mark. At least 5 overall.

Why are the exams becoming harder? It’s as if there’s some natural rate of ‘inflation’ in difficulty.
2021: ATAR: 99.95
2022-2024: University of Melbourne, BSci (Major in Mathematics and Statistics)

Sine

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Re: What’s with the increase in difficulty of the maths exams?
« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2021, 05:09:13 pm »
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I’ve often heard how methods exams and also spec exams have gotten a lot harder in the past few  years, and I’d have to agree.

I’m in year 12, but I pretty much pre-learned the whole course. So I’ve been looking at the past exams and tried picking the hardest questions from each. The  past 5-6 years have had some really tricky ones (quite visual), and some questions have an average mark of say 0.1/2.

I tried the 2006 spec exams and they are very easy compared to the recent ones. Both combined, I still managed to score 119/120. And just extrapolating, if I were to sit the recent exams, at this stage having not done revision, I’d definitely lose more than 1 mark. At least 5 overall.

Why are the exams becoming harder? It’s as if there’s some natural rate of ‘inflation’ in difficulty.
In 2006 the average scores for exam 1 and 2 were 43.6/80 and 88.8/160
In 2020 the average scores for exam 1 and 2 were 46.4/80 and 99.9/160

Although I do think some of the questions have gotten harder, even in recent years there have been exams on the easier side of things.

Moskva

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Re: What’s with the increase in difficulty of the maths exams?
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2021, 03:02:29 pm »
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In 2006 the average scores for exam 1 and 2 were 43.6/80 and 88.8/160
In 2020 the average scores for exam 1 and 2 were 46.4/80 and 99.9/160

Although I do think some of the questions have gotten harder, even in recent years there have been exams on the easier side of things.

But 2006 was the first year that Study Design was implemented... not really a fair comparison  :-\