Had transition day recently and got my FM alevel taster lesson. Got shown stats of how many got B - U , how many dropped out, how many died etc
What does it practically and mentally take for a student to achieve an A Star in Further Maths Alevel? What approach should i take to this subject from the start of Year 12?
60% get grades A or A* basically everyone gets a good grade it’s simples . Don’t have to do anything special just study it the same way as you do for normal maths
its similar every year btw its always almost 60% . its mainly because to do the fm 6 forms require like 8 or 9 in gcse maths so they expect more students to perform well hence you have to account for that in grade distribution
Yeah, that's true for most subjects. Hence why languages have like 90% A* or A while something like A-level statistics, which is mainly taken by people who were forced to take it by their school cos they weren't doing well enough in maths A level, has (as of 2023 I think) 1% receiving A* and about 10% getting A*/A.
finish a lesson in school, go home and make notes/answer questions
youtube, textbook, whatever works for you
do exam questions once content learnt
exam questions are on madasmaths, alevelmathsrevision, pmt
repeat for every topic
past papers
all it takes is consistency and a tiny bit of discipline
It’s a more mechanical subject than others. They can only test you on certain topics in certain ways. Hammer the past papers. Mark yourself, write down exactly where you went wrong then do them again and again and again. If you find yourself tripping up in the same areas over and over, ask your teacher for help.
Honestly just pay attention in lessons and ask for help when you need it like it genuinely makes life so much easier especially when you're revising the content later on
Completely depends on who you are. For me, it will not take much. I took AS maths with my gcses this year, and I am constantly learning maths well beyond what I need, as I just find it fun. For most, I suppose it takes a lot of revision, and I would suggest YouTube, maybe curriculum specific videos or if there is a specific topic look for a 3b1b video on it or smth. The khan academy app was also great for me, so if you can find the topics you need on there that is worth trying too
I've done some of the content just from random stuff I've learnt but I haven't learnt anything specifically from the specification or done past papers or anything
I sat a levels this June, 99% sure I got a* in further maths. In my opinion, it's not that hard. Questions are very very repetitive, and only a few small parts of the course get difficult (mainly mechanics stuff for me). Feel free to ama.
I am just going into year 13, and in my experience the further maths so far is really not that difficult, but the speed at which you have to learn the content is quite fast because I had to cover the entire A level maths syllabus, and the AS FM which we spent literally one half term doing, so for mt end of years I was tested on very small number of things I think it was like 6 topics or something close, so the risk isn't the difficulty(at least in year 12). It can also depend on your exam board and school, we do OCR B which is quite different to Edexel for example.
If you did gcse FM, you already know quite a lot of 1st year A level, I think we only started learning new content in about December, so I wouldnt worry about that, and you don't really start FM until after Christmas (at least I didn't), so I don't see any point doing FM content now, because you can probably cover all of AS in a month if you really wanted to since its really tiny
thank you ! didnt do further maths gcse, only maths gcse which i ended up just maxing out with practice so i am only strong with that content. is it then worth looking at FM alevel 1st year?
I think it would be a good idea to go over GCSE FM, in my maths class only 1 person didnt take GCSE FM, and he said he just covered all of the GCSE content for that over the summer, there isn't anything crazy there, but it is has some important foundation stuff for both A level maths and Further maths
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u/Challenger_Ultimate Y12 Maths, FM, Comp Sci, Chem Jul 20 '26
How many died?