- The formula sheet stapled to the back is still a weird feeling.
- Multiple choice was VERY kind. No curveballs here. Students may have been confused about how to attempt the absolute value integral in Question 9, but besides that, pretty stock standard.
- Typical Question 11; nothing surprising here. No difficult questions, good warm up for the paper.
- Typical Question 12; geometry makes the return again. A fairly simple geometric proof for Part B; and a very generous amount of marks devoted to the cosine rule in Part C. Pretty stock standard.
- Very nice curve sketching question to start Question 13; it's nice to change from the typical cubic polynomial we get here. Strong students shouldn't have had too much trouble with the first three, very standard question types and processes. Part D could throw you just by the look of it, but really, it's just area between curves. Remember units squared!
- They were always going to put Simpson's Rule in this year; because they gave you an application that required either two uses of formula, or some clever symmetry work (or the full version of the formula). Not too difficult otherwise. The way they wrote the series in Part (b)(i) may have made it difficult to get (b)(ii), expanding it first helps. Part C is typical calculus, nothing algebraically difficult, but students may have been silly like me and not substituted your value back into the length formula
Part D and E were clever series manipulation questions; clear direction made D reasonably easy. Part E would have been hard if you didn't spot the trick and remember your Log Laws.
- 15(a) was our difficulty spike. It required clever consideration of how you'd take the Volume; by considering only part of each curve. A solid 4 marker; the integral itself behaves nicely. We get another series probability Question in Part B; BOSTES love these now (MX1 students have gotten them frequently for a few years); but it not being infinity was a nice change. A TOUGH geometry proof for Part C, but assigning pro numerals makes things much easier. The final sub-part is easier than what precedes it.
- A very generous start to Question 16 this time; motion questions are free marks if you interpret them correctly. Mostly basic calculus work, taking your graph in Part (iii) and applying it to (iv) was the conceptual challenge here.
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Final Question: Very kind, or at least, could be loads worse. Quotient rule for 2 marks; justifying the range may have been difficult if you aren't good at conceptualising/formalising limits. The rearrangement section may have proved to stump a few; but we can do Part (iv) regardless, and its only worth a mark. The wording of the last sub-part was clear but easily misinterpreted if time was running out (I made this mistake initially as well). Students who did more than about 6-7 lines of working for the last sub-part probably differentiated the result from part (i), which was gross. This idea of 'recursive derivative formulae' is actually really cool; I'd like to see it pop up more in the exams; leads well into uni.
Overall,
this was not a tough 2U paper. Some very abstract questions; less of your common setups and more tricky things that require thinking on your feet. But no super disgusting questions like we had in the early 2000's, which is what I thought we'd be up against (I'm glad I was wrong).
Series seems to be the weird one this year; they took it out of the MC completely and scattered it throughout. Interesting.
22 marks for Applications of Calculus to Physical World, so that remains a huge part of the exam (this is bigger than any year in recent memory, actually).
Overall, Band cut-offs should sit steady from last year, perhaps drop ever so slightly. I did the Exam in 1.5 hours and so far, based on corrections, I got ~93% raw. This puts it roughly in line with the more recent exams. I'd personally say it was easier than 2014, but perhaps harder than 2015
What do you think?
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Topic: Suggested Answers to the HSC 2016 Mathematics Exam (+Discussion!) (Read 79031 times)