SO you're aiming for an A* or grade 9...?
There are a few crucial things you can do to try and improve your chances of scoring the top grade.
- Whenever you do a past paper, do it closed book, and knock off 10 mins from the time allowed. Repeat this and continue to knock off more and more time as you practice. This will help you to speed up, and help you to figure out which questions will be too time consuming to try, and which ones are worth doing to get you that top grade.
- Ask for extension material. If you're in a bigger class, or want to learn independently, then search online for top grade GCSE practice questions that will extend your problem solving skills.
- If you're tackling a tricky question and have no clue where to start, ask your teacher or consult a mark scheme for a prompt. Only look at the starting point, not the full answer, and then try to go from there.
- If you have extra time in class lessons or at home, look in your textbook for challenge questions, or complete mixed exercises that will need you to use multiple skills and formulae to solve a problem.
- Pinpoint your weaknesses and do lots of practice questions on them.
- Have a go at timing yourself to see how quickly you can draw an accurate graph. You don't want to waste more than about 3-4 minutes drawing a graph in the exam, so the more you practice, the faster you'll be.
- Learn fancy key Mathematical terminology e.g. extrapolation, asymptote, mutually exclusive etc.
- Try to relax before the exam and don't let anyone stress you out. Continuous practice for Maths is the best way to do well, so start looking for harder questions in around February and try to do 3-4 extended multi-step questions per week until the exam. Cramming won't be very useful.
- Ensure you know your formulae in your sleep. These are easy marks - don't lose them!!
- Go through your syllabus and make sure you are confident even with the smaller topics e.g. trend lines, capture-recapture, interpreting graphs, drawing circles, limits of accuracy and frequency polygons.
- Also, go through your syllabus with a fine toothed comb - even if a spec point is one sentence, it could come up!
- Never get complacent - to be a good Mathematician you must constantly be challenging yourself, so don't get too comfortable and stop revising. Doing a few tricky questions the weekend before your exam won't hurt.
- Whenever you do a past paper, do it closed book, and knock off 10 mins from the time allowed. Repeat this and continue to knock off more and more time as you practice. This will help you to speed up, and help you to figure out which questions will be too time consuming to try, and which ones are worth doing to get you that top grade.
- Ask for extension material. If you're in a bigger class, or want to learn independently, then search online for top grade GCSE practice questions that will extend your problem solving skills.
- If you're tackling a tricky question and have no clue where to start, ask your teacher or consult a mark scheme for a prompt. Only look at the starting point, not the full answer, and then try to go from there.
- If you have extra time in class lessons or at home, look in your textbook for challenge questions, or complete mixed exercises that will need you to use multiple skills and formulae to solve a problem.
- Pinpoint your weaknesses and do lots of practice questions on them.
- Have a go at timing yourself to see how quickly you can draw an accurate graph. You don't want to waste more than about 3-4 minutes drawing a graph in the exam, so the more you practice, the faster you'll be.
- Learn fancy key Mathematical terminology e.g. extrapolation, asymptote, mutually exclusive etc.
- Try to relax before the exam and don't let anyone stress you out. Continuous practice for Maths is the best way to do well, so start looking for harder questions in around February and try to do 3-4 extended multi-step questions per week until the exam. Cramming won't be very useful.
- Ensure you know your formulae in your sleep. These are easy marks - don't lose them!!
- Go through your syllabus and make sure you are confident even with the smaller topics e.g. trend lines, capture-recapture, interpreting graphs, drawing circles, limits of accuracy and frequency polygons.
- Also, go through your syllabus with a fine toothed comb - even if a spec point is one sentence, it could come up!
- Never get complacent - to be a good Mathematician you must constantly be challenging yourself, so don't get too comfortable and stop revising. Doing a few tricky questions the weekend before your exam won't hurt.
Gold dust - use these EXTRA resources!
In addition to past papers, try using some of these awesome resources to help you aim for that A* or grade 9:
Maths Explained problem solving playlist!
OnMaths demon questions!
Corbett's conundrums!
Maths Explained problem solving playlist!
OnMaths demon questions!
Corbett's conundrums!