The GCSE Maths Exams
With the new GCSE Maths exams looming we thought we would take a look at why people are finding the new 9-1 GCSE Maths specimen papers so tricky. The following are a brief look at what students and tutors have said about the new challenging GCSE Maths syllabus.
The types of questions have changed. So in the old style GCSE Maths exams you would get a straight forward cumulative frequency curve and you would be asked to calculate the median and interquartile range, whereas with the new style questions on the Edexcel and AQA GCSE Maths papers especially you have contextualised questions that are much more applied.
New topics such as functions, venn diagrams and interative methods are reasonably tricky and functions in particular require a high level of algebra ability to solve the more challenging questions.
Lack of resources and past papers means the new GCSE qualification is harder to prepare for.
The unknown. Although there are GCSE Maths specimen papers for AQA, Edexcel and OCR, no one really knows exactly what the real exams will be like and whether they will have toned it down a little after receiving nationwide feedback about the papers.
No easy questions in the new specimen papers. The old GCSE Maths papers started off reasonably easy and built up the difficulty level as you worked through the paper; whereas the specimen papers have no really easy questions to help you ease into the paper, they start tricky and end tricky.
There are plenty of reasons why students are finding the new GCSE Maths course challenging. At York Maths Tutor we believe we have prepared our GCSE Maths tutors really well to deal with the new challenges and to help our pupils to successfully navigate through the new questions types. If you are looking for a GCSE Maths tutor in York, contact York Maths Tutor today.