Specialist VS Further Maths

[BlueApple]

Hello everyone, I was just wondering, if I should drop Specialist Maths and exchange it for Further next year.
Currently, I am one of the top students in Methods. In Specialist however, I'm not failing, but I'm not doing extremely well. (Averaging at 60-80%)  In order to get the highest possible outcome I can achieve, I'm debating if I should continue with Specialist given it will become harder next year, or if I should pick up Further which will be easier. Thoughts?

[heids]

Quoting what EulerFan101 recently wrote:

THIS is the hard maths. In methods, you can get away with brute force and hard effort. For specialist, you do need to have an okay grasp at maths, or you very quickly get lost. The content is harder than methods, but there's also less of it. Furthermore, the exam questions for specialist end up nicer than the ones for methods, because comparatively the ideas in specialist are much more "complex" (bad pun for those doing spec)

However, specialist is *VERY* worth doing, particularly if you want to do a maths or engineering based degree. If you don't do specialist now, you will be playing catch-up later, so you may as well put in the hard yards. Also, nice scaling, who wouldn't want that?

Picture this:

You do Further, work really really hard, and get a 46. Decent score, yeah?
And in another dimension, you do specialist, work really really hard, get a 35. Not as nice, but it's specialist.

Now, here's the kicker - your scaled score is what contributes to your aggregate, not your raw. So, we scale those scores:
Further: 46----->45.2
Specialist: 35--->47

So, even though your raw score was worse in specialist, it very easily becomes a higher addition to your aggregate. And I'm talking similar workloads to get these two scores, btw - it's not as if you'd be putting more effort into specialist for this. Add on the fact that uni-wise, Further is very useless next to specialist, specialist seems like the obvious winning choice to me.
(obviously if specialist is beyond your skill-set, choose Further - but if you're tossing up between the two at all, this tells me you're capable of specialist).

In other words, if you're decent at maths - do spesh.

(and ideally post this in the Mathematics board)

[MrPeanutButter]

It depends...

Do you enjoy a good challenge? Pick Specialist!

Do you want to take the easy path and lose heaps of marks over the smallest of errors? Pick Further!

In my honest opinion, do Specialist. You will find it far more rewarding, and you will probably be more interested in the subject than if you chose Further.

Or you could do all three like me?!

[keltingmeith]

In order to get the highest possible outcome I can achieve, I'm debating if I should continue with Specialist given it will become harder next year, or if I should pick up Further which will be easier. Thoughts?

What topics have you covered?

[BlueApple]

We've covered, Matrices, Algebra 1 and 2, Transformations, Circular Functions 1 and 2 and Vectors

[keltingmeith]

We've covered, Matrices, Algebra 1 and 2, Transformations, Circular Functions 1 and 2 and Vectors

Cool. There are a total of two relevant chapters there for specialist 3/4:

Circ 2 (maybe, assuming this was reciprocal and inverse functions)
Vectors.

Everything else is either not covered or barely covered. I would not be using this year as an indication of how hard next year would be - it's like comparing a violin to a guitar. Sure, they both have strings -  similarities end about there.