I am aware that there are several 50 in Further Mathematics tips posts. I have read through them. But I have some different tips for the course content and I have tried to make sure that this post is not a repeat of tips others have provided. I did the Matrices and Networks modules. Some of this should help with studying in general. I didn’t mean for this post to become so long. For those short on time, I recommend that you just read from the ‘Strategies’ part and onwards.
My SAC scores and ranking:
- My SAC average was 97%
- I was equal rank 2 in a strong cohort
General Tips (which you can apply to any subject, particularly maths):
- Make strategies to avoid silly mistakes – I have gone into my strategies in detail below. This one is good for all subjects, particularly Maths and Science subjects.
- If you haven’t already, print out study design (for all subjects), scan through them.
- Print out further maths ATARnotes guides etc
- Print out summary notes as well. I downloaded digital copies of people’s bound references. This was particularly useful for me because whenever it came to making my bound reference I would check with others’ summaries to ensure that I had everything covered.
More specific Further Maths advice:
- As a wise person told me, doing well in Further is not very time-consuming. The best part is that the exercises, the chapter reviews and the course is pretty short. I only did checkpoints because I was always ahead in class and had nothing else to do. Not once did I have homework for Further. But I did study for SACs when they came by doing practice SACs etc.
- Consolidate knowledge with chapter reviews. The Cambridge textbook has very good exam style questions in their chapter reviews.
- When you have time, do checkpoints unless you don’t want to ruin past VCAA exams for yourself. I know that people say that checkpoints spoil past VCAA exams but it didn’t really affect it.
- I also did A+ notes questions. They were nice because they noted the difficulty of each question and therefore I could focus on the more difficult questions and test my understanding of the concepts.
Strategies:
- So reading through ATARnotes raw 50 posts throughout the year, I saw that making a strategy for silly mistakes is very important for such a high score. It was also because I am prone to silly mistakes (getting this score was a big surprise for me) so trying to use Further Maths to boost my ATAR was initially a nightmare.
- Make a mnemonic or some method that makes you remember to check the small things we all forget:
o Decimal places
o Units – percentage? Dollars?
o Required form – nearest dollar? In the form y=mx+c?
o Re-read question
o Check answer – is it logical?
This one I love particularly, and now that I think about it this is probably the reason why I achieved the score that I did. There is the usual ‘substitute the answer back in’ check that you should do for any calculation you do this year, but a few practice exams into my revision period I realised that there are several ways to attempt Further Math questions. So what I did was make 2-3 ways to figure out the answer to a question to check the answer. This was very helpful in the Matrices module. And in the final exams I can still recall at least two times where this saved me a few marks!
- This may sound weird, but read with a finger to the page so you don’t miss anything! You need to make sure that you interpret the question correctly. You may not have enough time to re-read the question or change your answer if you misread the question the first time. This was probably the number one reason why I lost marks in my SACs, other than lack of knowledge…
- Note down the different mistakes you make throughout the year. I kept a notebook throughout the year where I kept a log of all the mistakes I made in tests, SACs and practice exams in every subject. I would revise these mistakes and figure out strategies to prevent them from happening again. This was very useful since whenever I came across a question that was similar to one where I lost marks I would remind myself not to make the same mistake.
- Read exam reports ASAP, I printed out reports for each of my subjects and read through them. This allowed me to be aware of the marking scheme for questions before I even started school. Exam reports are the most valuable resource as it is useful from the start of the year and a silly mistake log goldmine type thingy. You can read others’ careless mistakes before a SAC. Another great thing about Further is that the exam reports are easy to understand before you learn the content similar to subjects where the ½ is very similar to the ¾.
How I attempted my exam revision:
- During class I tried to do as many practice exams as I could and ask as many questions as I could.
- At home I did full length practice exams. Maybe a total of around 15? I didn’t count.
- But I didn’t just do complete exams, I also went through the exams I didn’t have enough time to do, and do the questions that I found difficult or that less than 50% of people got right.
- I kept 2015, 2016 and 2017 NHT for last.
Course content – the things 40+ students must know: - I will try to add to this once I look back at my notes!
My advice is to print the stuff below (and other things like this) out and keep them with you. Whenever you are studying for a SAC you’ll have a resource to check for the more difficult things. I apologise in advance for not having a lot of stuff below and for any errors, I am doing this all based on my memory.
CORE Data and Statistics:
- Standard deviation is NOT affected by the mean or something. Sorry, can’t remember atm.
- Those worded questions about correlations and associations are tricky. Try to master them now. In the last minute of my first exam I realised that I had misread something in the question and that the question I was stuck on for so long was actually pretty easy.
- There are several types of worded questions that come up! So I just made a table of them and stuck them in my bound. Here is a snippet of it:
CORE Financial maths:
- I just kinda memorised each different type of loan and investment
- But understanding also extremely important. I achieved this through the summaries provided in the Cambridge textbook. The past exam multiple choice questions where they test understanding of loans and investments with worded questions rather than problems are really good for this too.
- Interest is always charged! – Eg. There are 15 payments and after the 14th payment there is $5 left to pay. What is the value of the 15th payment? It ain’t $5. It’s more! This is because there is interest being charged on the final repayment too. It actually seems pretty obvious when I type it in words but imagine more numbers!
- These tricky questions are important to identify in past exams and master. A big part of my revision was recognising such questions and looking for more similar ones for practice.
- Be aware of things like
o Eg. V0=1 –> see the naught and the one, it’s so weird! And therefore, confusing.
o Eg. For the 7th year of investment you may have calculate the compound interest as (1.01)8 instead of 7 depending on the question.
Matrices
- Learning to use permutation matrices for finding matrices that only show particular values from an original matrix. This was in the 2016 and 2017 exams.
- Practice describing what a matrix represents. Although it is easy, you have to be very specific and thus, it’s easy to lose marks in these types of questions.
Networks
- A lot of people in my cohort changed from this module to geometry or graphs because it is so different to the algebra type maths we encounter in methods or specialist. I am definitely just like those people but hey, I still did well.
- Crashing! It’s so important, and any other way they can modify a network’s completion time. This is usually the most difficult type of question in this module for Exam 2.
- In general, just understanding networks. The dummies, the delays, the terminology etc. is so important. It took me several YouTube videos to completely understand crashing. I actually lost all my marks on the Networks SAC because of the crashing question – which was 4 marks.
Good luck to all. I hope you all work hard, persist and get the marks you desire. If there is anything specific in the course you want me to cover, PM me. I am also working on a general VCE studying post. If there are any errors in this post, or if I am not clear in any way please tell me!
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