How to Actually Study A Level Maths

Okay, so the first half term's over. Maybe you're starting the second half term as well. And you probably think it's going okay, but if you feel like you're falling a bit behind, then bear in mind, if you've done a topic test so far and you've got less than 80%, you are not on track to get an A or an A star. I know that sounds very brutal, but I want to be honest with you so you can actually fix it very quickly. I'm going to show you how to study A-level maths. This also applies to further maths, because luckily the resource I'm going to show you has A-level maths and further maths in it, so it's nice and easy. so the first thing is for the love of god don't do the textbook the textbook is good for a very very basic understanding but if you use the textbook for your questions the highest grade I've ever seen someone get using the textbook is a C but more than likely you get a D or below so the textbook is good for the basic basic understanding so if you're trying to teach yourself a certain chapter you know looking at the textbook and doing a few questions can help you learn that instead you do want to do exam questions by topic however the common places to find this kind of suck so for example PMT is notoriously bad for this why do I say this well I'll give you a story about one of the students that I teach so she's doing A level maths obviously I set homework every single week anyway around five hours of homework and that's all you need to do to study she wanted more she went to PMT did the exam questions but the problem is is it links to later topics. So for example she was doing the quadratics topic and there was questions where you had to differentiate for quadratic modelling. There were questions that used trig modelling as well and obviously she thought to herself Jesus Christ I don't know anything. In fact the most famous example of this was in the inequalities exam questions which are under chapter three she can do any of them because they relied on later chapters. There's even disguised quadratics that relied on logarithms for example and that's it's fair enough because again the exam questions that you're actually going to do do link across the board sometimes however MadasMaths is probably the greatest A-level maths resource ever I'm going to show you very quickly what to do because okay not gonna lie the website is a bit crap to look at but the actual resource is amazing so I'm going to show you that now quickly so yeah absolutely beautiful right but in all seriousness this is genuinely some of the best thing i've ever seen he has made exam questions they are not from past papers he's made them all himself which first of all insane so you're not waste wasting past papers so if you go to maths booklets you are going to be looking at basic topics if you're in year 12 standard topics if you're in year 13 further topics if you're in further maths and let's just have a look at some of these so for example uh that was the basic for calculus sorry basic topic look at all of this so i like to pick let's see discriminant exam questions and discriminant practice 55 questions right there exam style questions what's even better and this is the thing i love the most about this resource it's not just there's a bunch of questions it's in order of difficulty so what he's done is he's made questions that slowly but surely take you from a basic understanding to a very deep understanding that will get you an a star in maths beautiful so yeah this fairly simple and by the way this has come up on an exam paper before but as you go along kind of goes like it's rated by stars by the way so if you keep going two star plus okay slightly higher slightly getting harder and then if you start going down a little bit there you go four star question you have these two quadratic curves case constants they touch each other determine the possible values all of the solutions are really small here but they're really small because if you think about it if on an iPad or something if you zoom in because it's a PDF the quality doesn't decrease amazing right so you don't have to open up multiple things to look at the solutions and again if i keep going down by the way there you go getting slightly harder now full worked solutions and again these are questions you can bring to your teachers as well if you still don't get it from here that's amazing some of the range of possible values so good such a good and interesting question if you are looking at doing anything at uni that requires an entrance exam like TMUA or the ESAT these are beautiful questions that can come up on those papers as well so yeah genuinely this is probably the best resource I've ever seen there you go it links to slightly other questions but technically not really you don't actually need to know anything because he's given you everything you need to know and by the way it is meant to be a five-star question beautiful and he's done this for everything so again this is another 34 pages of just discriminant stuff if I remember rightly it was quadratics or something like that where it has 86 pages there's something i was sending someone the other day it had 168 pages there was 190 questions in there you'll never run out ever and again this applies also to well again integration when you get onto that as well it also applies to further maths which i think was the last one i opened they are complex numbers Argand diagrams all of that fun stuff which again you 170 pages of complex numbers you will not run out of stuff to do here and it's really really really good as a resource and then there's more you go to these practice papers this is old spec but remember the spec didn't actually change they just reordered stuff so all of this is relevant to you and c1 and c2 by the way is year 12 maths now A level practice papers, look at this, this is year 12 A level maths that's year 13 A level maths, this is further maths year 12, that's further maths year 13, and then it also has stats and mechanics and stuff down there as well everything you could possibly need, but what's better about this, look at this, go to the practice papers A to R standard difficulty, like they gradually go up in difficulty S and T are extremely hard, so okay, let's open up like A, let's open up M, and let's open up, what was it, S and T S and T are extremely hard, yeah, like, if you want to get really good at maths, you want to find hard questions and learn how to do them, so, okay, this, this is literally a year 12 maths paper, it's beautiful, like, this will work perfectly, and then as you, you know, you get slightly harder and everything, so you, okay, getting a little bit, getting a little bit intense, getting a little bit intense, and I understand, by the way, you probably haven't covered most of this yet, perfect, literally perfect resource I'd recommend everyone use this, it's everything you need, you'll never run out of stuff and then by the time you get to let's say February March time when you finish the pure content you've got practice papers you've also got all of the past papers you've also got all of the old spec past papers yeah it's it's incredible like this website is everything you need for A level Maths you do not need another website period absolute period and again what do you do when you find something you can't do okay the worked solutions if that doesn't work obviously people haven't gone through these papers on YouTube really I don't think so that might be a bit tricky but you have your teachers at school you have private tutors you have AI that can explain to you say I'm a year 12 maths student I've covered chapters one to five on the Edexcel spec how do I do this question it will give you a pretty good worked solution but use those but this website is the only resource you're ever going to need all right now I've stopped glazing MadasMaths for a bit let's move on to the next thing again understand what you are doing it's not enough to do the question, you have to build that understanding. That's another reason why I like MadasMaths, because again, the questions get slightly more complicated as you go along, so you're building up that understanding very, very slowly and very, very methodically. But if you do a question, you read the worked solution, you say, okay, that makes sense, but do you actually understand what's happening? This way you need to test it. How do you test this? Well, okay, you've looked at a worked solution, you've done it, okay, it makes sense. One or two days later, try the same question again. You don't even need to change the numbers. do the same question again, can you get the right answer? if not, it means you don't understand it what if you change, what if you put that question into ChatGPT, ask it to change the numbers, can you do the question now? That's how you test your understanding. The next thing is the kind of number that's thrown around is work five plus hours per week, per subject as well, but I might the most important thing for me is regularly do it so the reason why I set five hours of homework every week for my students at school and also for tuition is I don't want you doing it all in one day, I want you to have so much work that you think okay it makes sense for me to do two hours on Monday, two hours on Wednesday and another hour on Friday, right? that's what you kind of want to look at doing, the reason for this is maths is a skill, it's not memory, you can memorize stuff in other subjects like biology and chemistry and history and all this other stuff and you can do that all in one day, but maths is not memory, maths is understanding and problem solving and to build that you need to use it as regularly as humanly possible so that's why I recommend doing it regularly. Hopefully your school timetable lets you have maths three separate times per week, like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or something like that, but it doesn't always work that way. The last thing, I've done a video very recently, or it's coming out soon, I can't remember, about the common mistakes in chapter one to four, and also chapter seven, that my students made. So it's based on the test I've done. Please draw graphs, you need diagrams, you need graphs, because inequalities you can't solve algebraically all the time. But that brings me to the end of that hopefully you found that video useful, hopefully it was interesting, yeah I'll see you in the next one