math question in tests (1 Viewer)

jonhysmitw2

Active Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2022
Messages
147
Gender
Male
HSC
2023
I have a math test on Tuesday and I feel like I'm very prepared, however, in every test I've done, there are always questions I've never seen and I am not sure what to do. How can I prevent this from happening, even after I've studied heaps in advance.
 

pikachu975

Premium Member
Joined
May 31, 2015
Messages
2,739
Location
NSW
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
Gotta work on problem solving skills/approaching questions and also understanding content in depth

With those two skills you can take on any question
 

jonhysmitw2

Active Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2022
Messages
147
Gender
Male
HSC
2023
Gotta work on problem solving skills/approaching questions and also understanding content in depth

With those two skills you can take on any question
Yeah, I agree, but how can I work on those skills as all the practice questions I do are very straightforward and don't require much thinking lol. Specifically most trial questions
 

ZakaryJayNicholls

Active Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2022
Messages
126
Gender
Male
HSC
2010
Uni Grad
2018
I have a math test on Tuesday and I feel like I'm very prepared, however, in every test I've done, there are always questions I've never seen and I am not sure what to do. How can I prevent this from happening, even after I've studied heaps in advance.
Short answer, you can't.

Math teachers are quite clever, they will almost always try to add trick questions to your exams which even the most diligent students have not seen and don't know how to do. You can attempt questions in books like Cambridge/Terry Lee, but there are infinitely many trick questions teachers can work into exams.

Your teacher will never expect you or essentially any of your class to get 100% (even if they say they do, they will not believe this, as the tests need to produce a distribution with which to allocate ranks). There will occasionally be a few students who get full marks all the time, but these are the exception not the norm.

So, if you encounter a question which you don't know how to do (when you are in an exam), you should just try them using anything you think might work. If you did it right that's great, if not that's great too because you now have a new mathematical concept to learn after the test is returned.

Much of the most important learning you do in math will be from questions you get wrong, and if you are doing math at your level you will always be getting things wrong. Above all, don't worry about getting these trick questions wrong, focus instead on learning from them when you get the papers back. Learning how to do questions you initially get wrong is much more useful for higher level math or further study.
 

pikachu975

Premium Member
Joined
May 31, 2015
Messages
2,739
Location
NSW
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
Yeah, I agree, but how can I work on those skills as all the practice questions I do are very straightforward and don't require much thinking lol. Specifically most trial questions
There must be questions in those past papers that you can't do. The thing is most people just look at the answers and go "ok nice got it" and move on but I guarantee a week later you probably won't be able to solve that same question. So basically what u gotta do is try to reflect on what u could've done to figure out how to solve the question, or even just look for "what could've hinted at that first step?" Maybe it was some info given in the question, or maybe the question linked to a certain topic and u use knowledge of that, or you look at the final thing they want u to "prove/show that" and get hints from that.

And my second point was understanding the content. If you don't actually understand the maths content you most likely won't be able to apply it to new questions. This is because if u just rote learn the content/formulas, as soon as u're forced to apply ur knowledge rather than follow a memorised method/formula then u can't.

Lastly, obviously u have to actually do hard questions to improve your problem solving and thought processes.

Anyway those are my tips since I was in the same boat when doing Maths Ext 2 and could not do the hard questions (e.g. q16 I could barely do it usually) and eventually improved it.
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 1)

Top