reflection on the hsc part 1.5
Mathematics Extension 1 - Such a great paper. Not too hard, not too easy, but just perfect. A jolly good show done by the few sane people of BOS I must admit; the paper did pull a few tricks but on the whole, a fair assessment on one’s skills as a potential mathematician. I had particular trouble on question 6, last part and question 7 b (i) and (iii). So I may be a 4U student, but that doesn’t make me particularly smart with these questions, much to my own dislike. Surprisingly I ran out of time like I did with 4U. Normally it would take me about 1.2 hours to do the paper but it took me the full 2 hours this time. Having said that, a clearer head would have done me good trying to rat out that stupid combination in question 7.
I thought I had done the other questions of the paper fairly well, probably a few rotten marks were lost from poor reasoning. I know from the people around me that a lot of people struggled with the whole of question 6 and the entire question 7 part b. No-one complained about any other question so I take it that this was a pretty easy paper. There was this one nasty little auxiliary angle question that had something like: 2cosx + cos (x + pi/3). It really stumped me for a while but after realising that I could expand it and pi/3 was one of the special angles, I whacked myself for not seeing how easy it really was. You see, during exams you see and do the STUPIDEST things. You cannot imagine how blind you become in year 12.
So yeah…not much for this paper but it was pretty sweet. Hope it scales well. =D
Exam raw mark expectation - 78/84
Trials raw mark - 76.5/84