Hiya!
Let’s crack on with my summary of Pearsons Higher paper 3 …
The general consensus was that students were entered appropriately for the Higher tier .. which is good to know! They confidently tackled the start of the paper, and once again, we saw very few blank pages. Presentation was generally clear and logical, which is a massive win! However, just like Paper 2, a major theme running through the report was algebraic fluency slips and students miscopying numbers or expressions from line to line.
The Good News!
- The calculator skills question and rounding to significant figures in were highly accessible and the standard multi-step question involving reverse percentages and standard rearrangement of formulas were also answered very well by students who confidently broke their working down into smaller steps.
- Estimating the mean from a grouped frequency table remains a solid banker for students, with most choosing the correct class midpoints. Density, mass, and volume calculations also saw fantastic use of tables to organise data logically.
The Bits that hurt ….
- Inequalities on Number Lines: Too many students are still mixing up open and closed circles … the examiners also noted that many drew circles so tiny it was impossible to tell if they were shaded or not. Tell your classes: make those circles big and bold!
- Laws of Indices: When simplifying what I call “powers of powers” i.e. brackets, a classic misconception reared its head where students added the powers instead of multiplying them.
- Formula Triangles … love them or hate them?!?!: While formula triangles help some, the examiners warned that students who rely on them often draw them with variables in the wrong positions … Remind students to use the units given in the question to deduce that Density = Mass / Volume.
- Cumulative Frequency: For the interquartile range, a common blunder was subtracting the cumulative frequencies instead of reading the actual values off the horizontal axis and frustratingly may students didn’t read the question carefully and found the number of trees less than a specific height rather than more than.
Some other things worth noting …
To bridge the gap between a good grade and an amazing grade, here is what we need to focus on based on the final questions of Paper 3:
1. Explicitly teach how to “Show That”
Students generally found the proof and “show that” questions very challenging … the report gives a clear piece of advice: teach students to start strictly with the given information and work forward until they reach the required value. Trying to “meet in the middle” by working from both ends usually leads to a messy structure and lost marks.
2. Guard the Brackets!
In algebraic proof and other points in this paper, missing brackets caused absolute heartbreak … we need to hammer home that whenever they substitute an expression into a power, it must go inside brackets.
3. Label “found values in multi-step contexts
On multi-step problems students who explicitly label their steps by for example writing “Volume of cylinder = ” or “Gradient of M =” were far more successful as it prevents them from losing track of their own numbers and allows examiners to award follow-through process marks if a silly arithmetic slip happens.
4. Geometric reasoning needs rigour
Back to the old favourite mistake … nothing new here … students missed out on marks because they didn’t provide formal geometric reasons. Writing, for example AB = BC isn’t enough, they must explicitly state why they are equal. Also worth noting is the fact that there were some three-letter angle notation errors, which cost a surprising number of marks.
So, there you go … I read ALL that sh1t so you didn’t have to.
Hope it was useful! Mel
