Up front I’m not getting into a discussion about “gaming” because I genuinely don’t believe that looking at past papers and trying to pick out topics is anything that any student wouldn’t be doing themselves .. it is certainly what I would do if I was sitting an exam! The rationale is that I want to provide my students with some focus topics, rather than them trying to “revise” everything.

In fact this is how the Top 40 originally developed with Seagers intervention teaching groups. It started because he would focus on specific topics and teach them well – obviously there are always peripheral topics that you need to teach too, and the rest of the department in the lead to the final exams would focus on what in “olden times” would be called “REVISION”, and let me tell you something … it works!! Lets put that in perspective … most of you will now what I mean when I mention HA’s, MA’s and LA’s (High Attainers, Middle Attainers and Low Attainers if you don’t) and how much focus is put on those tricky borderline students (the MA’s) – your level 4s that you need to get a C. In the last results we were responsible for 97% of the MA’s made expected progress, which when you look at other similar schools and given the type and size of the cohort is amazing!

So I thought I’d formally share what I’ve been keeping track of  – not that I don’t trust gut feelings but I genuinely like to see for myself when someone says “oh yeah XXX comes up all the time!”. Since the start of the Edexcel 1MA0 papers I’ve made a note of the marks available for each question/topic and then produce some pivot tables so that I get some analysis of both total marks and also number of appearances since June 2012 (the first sitting). I must give you a health warning that this is based on my opinion of what topic each question is (not an issue really unless there is a question that includes two topics or is difficult to define i.e. proportional reasoning!) but even given that caveat it will give you a broad idea and a possible starting point.

The powerpoint file is available here: June 2012 to Nov 14 – 7 sittings . Note that I have shown those have appeared in 5 or more of the 7 exam sessions.

There are no guarantees that the topics will come up … that isn’t what this is about. Use it or ignore it as you choose.