There is an awful lot in here. A great book, I now need to reflect on what to do with it. There are some things I want to try but it’s important that change is incremental. In the meantime, so I don’t lose them, here are my notes.
Monthly Archives: April 2018
Revision questions for top-end GCSE
I have a top set Year 11 class this year. There is quite a range in the class and although there are definitely still gaps to be filled, I am always on the lookout for questions that will challenge them. What worries me most about the mock papers they have done is that they panic when the context is unfamiliar. In the words of this fantastic resource which Danny talks about here, it is about making something that is unfamiliar more familiar.
So I thought I would scour some old O level exam papers. It was an interesting exercise and I have pulled together a selection of questions here which I have categorised into Calc and Non-calc. Originally, of course these would all have been tackled with nothing more than a pencil and a book of tables!
I have attempted to modernise some of them using metric units and trying to make the language more straightforward for today’s students. I have also added some diagrams as there seemed to be a lot of reliance in those days on interpreting a dense description of a geometric situation and drawing it.
I haven’t attempted to assign a number of marks to each question, I think they range from 3 to about 6 in today’s money, but I’ll leave you to decide that.
They haven’t been used in anger with my class yet, but please get in touch if you have any thoughts on these.
mho maths 