Competitions

So much has happened since I last updated!

I have entered many maths competitions, I'll see what I can remember. On September 26th I entered the Maths Olympiad for Girls. I got my result today... 13/50. Percentage wise, that is very poor, but in context, it isn't bad, as many, many people got 0 or 1. In fact, I was only one mark off a merit certificate, although I did get one for participating.

Also in September, I completed the Scottish Maths Challenge, and found it a little easier than in previous years, though I haven't received any results, so I don't know how well I did yet.

I sat the MAT, but it was impossible: more difficult than the hardest questions of all the other maths challenges put together! So that will be a very low score and a rejection.

The next day, I did the Senior Maths Challenge, and that was much more fun. I believe I got 96, which will qualify me for the Senior Kangaroo, and put me one question away from the BMO qualifier. In fact, there was one question I nearly got right, but decided to change my guess at the last minute, and if I had left it, I would have qualified. However, that competition is much too difficult for me, and I really wouldn't have wanted to get zero, so I will be happy to sit the Kangaroo.

I have also made a lot of progress with the Advanced Higher course, and I will post about that another day. Keep checking back for updates!

Success

My exam results are in! I wasn't exactly confident about physics and English; however, I didn't need to worry, as I did manage 5 As! I am very happy with that, although obviously I won't be relaxing for a minute, and have continued with the advanced maths course. The thing I'm doing just now seems impossible and I can't find anything on the web about using Fermat's Little Theorem to show how a square is either divisible by 5, or one more or less than a multiple of 5. I will have to just skip it out and press on however, and I will be doing a summary of the topic tomorrow, then move on to differentiation the day after. This course is going by so quickly!

Much progress!

Well this week has been eventful! On Friday I finished my Mathletics course, I've been very close to doing that for ages, but it's been a year since I started it and it was definitely time to just do it. I have 100% on all 187 tasks now! That was at about 3pm, and just as I did that, my Unit 2 Advanced Higher book arrived. I thought I'd already done enough maths for the day so I waited until the next day, Saturday, to start it. I've now done four exercises (not bad for 3 days' work), but I'm not doing anything else right now as I will be on holiday until Friday. I will then work as hard as I can to finish off the first chapter, though it's a very difficult one, covering mathematical proof, which I don't really have any prior knowledge of. And my exam results are a week tomorrow, where is this time off going! I'm still going to try and finish the next chapter, Further Differentiation, before school starts in August, it will be quite tight in 2 weeks but I can get through it pretty fast.

One third of the way there

Well I have now made progress: I have finished the whole of unit 1 of Advanced Higher! One third of the way through my last school qualification, already. It doesn't feel like that long since I finished unit 1 of Int 2! I was reviewing my knowledge of Gaussian elimination today - it's basically a very sophisticated method for solving simultaneous equations. It can be time consuming and fiddly, but it's not that difficult, although it's pretty easy to make a very silly arithmetic mistake. I'd like to eliminate these mistakes, well, it's an excuse to play Mathletics during the holidays!

I will be revising the first unit of Advanced Higher Maths this week, and then I will try some of the resources on the UKMT website, as they are meant to be good preparation for the university entrance exams. I may possibly start unit 2 soon, it's tempting but I need to leave something to do when I start school in August, in 5 weeks.

Integration

Just a little info on how I'm getting on with the Advanced Higher Maths course: after a lot of both hard work and fun, I have finished Pascal's triangle, Partial fractions, and Differential calculus and its applications. I am currently working on Integration, and have managed to make some progress, although I did find some of the substitution questions impossible! I have just started to do this substitution with limits, and I'm finding it pretty easy, although there was one question which didn't make any sense! I also have more difficult substitution in the next exercise, so we will see how I manage tomorrow.

Exam season over

My exams are over now, culminating in Spanish yesterday. I have finished all the Higher work I will ever do! I'm actually not sure what to do with my free time now. I have been working on the Advanced Higher Maths course, and also have a plan to finish off a story I have been writing, along with a new personal essay. I'd also like to reread the literature I did last year, "Hamlet" and "The Great Gatsby". In addition to all this, I want to improve my Spanish skills, although I'm not yet sure how I'll do this.

Aside from the summer, my exams for maths, chemistry and Spanish went pretty well, physics wasn't very good, and the English critical essay was appalling. I'm not especially looking forward to results day now, but there is nothing I can do! There are two months until then anyway, so I will continue to work hard, and the results won't really change anything.

Time flies!

Time is going by so fast right now! There are only 7 more days 'til my English exam, and only 9 'til my maths exam! Then I have another 3, and then my Higher days are over forever. My others are chemistry, physics and Spanish. I am mainly focusing on English at the moment, as it is the hardest for me, although I have been doing past papers for everything else. I have done all the maths ones since 1995, plus the 1992 paper. I will do the 1994 paper next week, then that will be it, as I cannot find the 1993 paper anywhere. It is interesting to see how the higher paper has changed: I cannot complain about any of the questions from the modern papers! I have just completed the 1995 paper, and it had a horrible optimisation question (made worse by the fact I had forgotten about the chain rule), although some things aren't really hard, but I just do wrong (like confusing an altitude and median). I got 100% on my second maths prelim (on all 3 units) a couple of weeks ago, so I am kind of looking forward to this exam (although I think I must be the only person to do so!).

Meanwhile, I have completed a few things in the Advanced Higher course, but I have temporarily stopped, at least until my English exam is over. Then I will do a little, until chemistry and physics are done, then I will catch up. I plan to have completed all of unit 1 by the time I go to school in August!

Prelims and progress

I haven't posted on here in so long! Here are my prelim scores:

Spanish - 83%
English - 85%
Chemistry - 90%
Physics - 92%
Maths - 99%

I am very happy with those... although obviously I wish I could have got 100% on maths (it was a stupid mistake as well) and it would have been nice to get 2 marks more on Spanish for a clean sweep of A band 1s!

Back to maths, which this blog is meant to be about! In the prelim there was a question about the square of something being three, and you had to set up an equation to solve it. I forgot that every number has two square roots and lost a mark. At first, I was annoyed, but now, I am far too busy doing Advanced Higher maths and revising for my other exams to care!

In Advanced maths, I have completed one chapter about Pascal's triangle and binomials, which was abstract but very interesting, and now I am on the differentiation chapter (I skipped partial fractions as they looked a little too tough!). It is incredibly difficult, but I know it will get easier as time goes by.

Maths

It's been a while since I posted on here, I'm such a bad blogger! Well, there isn't that much to report, other than I got my 7th gold certificate on Mathletics last week, and I have nearly finished that course, as I only have about 10 activities to go (all about logarithms/exponents), but I haven't been doing that much recently as Mathletics is no longer a priority, which brings me to it: I have my mock maths exam on Tuesday, which is scary, 'cause every past paper I have done (2006-2009) has had at least one question which has stumped me. I know that I might struggle, but I am going to aim for at least 95% (with full marks on multiple choice).