What would you think of having a subject harder then specialist maths?

[milanander]

At least from a Vic perspective, I think it'd be a great idea to introduce interested high-schoolers to the rigour of university maths (although I guess that's what the uni extension subjects are for, but this might be more accessible?).

Yes I agree, having a uni-level maths subject for VCE would be so much more accessible to students. I know there are some schools out there that don't allow students to do uni extension subjects, which is a real shame.

I was originally planning on doing either UMEP maths or physics but didn't fulfill the prereqs for either

As someone who was "good" but not in that top/"genius" range (44 raw in methods, 39 raw in spesh), looking back I definitely underestimated how difficult uni maths would be and got a rude shock when I started. Might have been a better reality check for other students like me... That being said, I'd still say I enjoy and find maths fascinating and I'm still planning on taking more maths subjects (hopefully doing complex analysis won't destroy my engineering masters WAM), so I don't think it will scare away too many prospective uni maths students who are truly passionate

Wdym? 44 raw puts you in top ~2% of the state :O

But yeah I get what you're saying and it's one of my biggest worries. As someone who's hoping to study engineering at uni, I've been warned multiple times of the giant gap between VCE maths and university-level maths, even for spesh students, and I really wish VCE could let us be better prepared. I guess in the meantime I just gotta study ahead by myself.

[RuiAce]

It’s good that NSW are fixing their syllabus and making it better. I can’t see that happening anytime soon down here

It would be amazing if we could have four maths subjects, with one being harder than spesh, but it just doesn’t seem that likely when VIC is so much weaker in maths. Truly unfortunate.

Who knows, maybe one day

I totally agree, my chemistry teacher mentioned on how we were doing actual science instead of regurgitation and memorisation (although some parts still have that).

How are the new maths syllabus for NSW? Much much better than the old one or just new improvements such as statistics and so on? I know that they removed all of the year 10 stuff and introduced some yr12 topics to the prelim advanced math course.

Like, depends on your definition of "better". At least the concepts lead into first year uni a lot more now. And they're just more relevant to real world maths altogether.

Also invites some more investigation-based assessment tasks instead of just test, test, exam, which is good.

Just not too sure if the difficulty has been nerfed a little.

[HUA0007]

We do. Maths extension 2 here in NSW is miles ahead of Spec. Honestly it would be better to have the NSW math curriculum to be introduced in VCE, as Spec is not too difficult, and 4U actually tests your understanding and problem solving skills to a high degree.

Only bumping because I googled this.