Project Maths Course

keeirs

Anyone else out of the other 23 schools that are doing the horrible "Project Maths" course, reading this please let me know what ye think of it? Im in ordinary level and i honestly think im going to go mad! Its such a horrible course..I want the old one back

ciarashauna

I know this is an oldish post, but I have to completely agree with you. It's a horrible course. I'm doing the honours & it's just terrible. Did you have mocks yet?

wazzarooney

Did my mocks, didn't get results but defo failed. Will probably go into OL

ciarashauna

Yeah I only had Pap 2 so far, but it was so hard, really think I failed it aswell. Don't know whether to drop down or not!

rstax

Im in the honours and have paper one mock tomorrow!!.
Any heads up for the paper 2 mock??..Finding it impossible to study that paper ..

PJelly

Ye want the old honors course back? Project maths is easier than the honors maths course that this years lc students are doing, it's like honors maths lite

ciarashauna

Are you doing the Project Maths course PJelly?

PJelly

Nope, I'm in 6th year so I'm doing the normal honors course. Though our 5th years are all doing project maths. They say that its a lot simpler than they expected. And I heard that colleges have been complaining that the students who do Project Maths wont have a high enough level of maths for maths based courses as Project Maths leaves out things like Vectors.

My opinion is basically based on hearsay so its liable to change

ciarashauna

Yeah I'm in 6th aswell so I'm doing nearly the whole project maths course apart from Calculus. The 5th years may be finding it easy 'cos they're only doing a few strands of it.
I think it's actually being brought in because universities found students couldn't actually apply themselves to maths, they were just learning off methods. Project maths is much more 'real-life'. Well so they want us to believe :P. It's really not ha.

PJelly

Oh, I thought all schools were the same in that the 6th years do normal maths while the 5th years do project maths.
Thank god I'm doing normal maths anyway, I LOVE VECTORS

Except in our mocks we got an impossible vector question. Literally impossible. My grinds teacher looked at it for like 15 mins and said "it... cant be done"
Something about how it was worded.

ciarashauna

No there's 24 pilot schools been doing it past 3 years I think, we're the guinea pigs. I think I'm glad I'm not doing vectors then :P
We got a sample paper before the mocks from the project maths team, & our teacher worked out it would probably have taken us 5 and a half hours to complete, even if we knew everything on the paper! It's ridiculous, so much writing.

PJelly

So much writing? Like theory or something?
Theres usually not that much writing in maths o_o

Unless you get an awful part C or Integration By Parts question or something. Then you're looking at 2 pages.

ciarashauna

There's a lot of writing about why you've chosen to do something etc. In the mocks we got a whole 25 mark question on market research

Desire to Aspire

PJelly wrote: »

So much writing? Like theory or something?
Theres usually not that much writing in maths o_o

Unless you get an awful part C or Integration By Parts question or something. Then you're looking at 2 pages.

You have to explain why you did what you did.

LCprisoner

I'm also doing project maths and although the syllabus hasn't been changed much, more so the approach, it's quite worrying. Mainly because teachers are panicked because passed papers aren't available and the questions could be a total surprise on the day.

I was just wondering if anyone had time to reply and give advice on just passing the paper. I'm only in ordinary but maths is definitely my weakest subject. In fact I'm not worried about any other subject (doing honours in everything else.) Maths won't be counted points wise for me, but it's definitely a requirement. Maybe I'm overreacting but if you fail maths you fail your leaving cert. and I'm really worried that the rest of the hard work or good results won't matter if I do bad in this area that I've neglected for so long.

Please if anyone has any tips on how to pass the paper, much appreciated!

ciarashauna

I don't really know how to help you, but one thing is DON'T PANIC! Honestly that's the one thing I'll say. The questions sometimes look a lot harder than they are, so the best thing to do is just to remain calm.
Another thing is that say you don't get one part of a question, but you need it for the next part, stay calm. In project maths you can always 'assume' things. You can use an estimate or assumption to just show the method you would have used. You prob. won't get full marks but the examiner will know you understand what to do.

rstax

PJelly wrote: »

Ye want the old honors course back? Project maths is easier than the honors maths course that this years lc students are doing, it's like honors maths lite

The worst thing about it I think is the unknown element of it all!. The lack of past papers to work from, (only one sample HL paper!).. Teachers don't really know how the questions are gonna be asked!. I'm not saying that the old course is easy, or easier..But this is just kind of impossible to prepare for!
Good luck to all doing it! I know I'll need all the luck I can get :L

Aoifums

Oh you poor things. I got shown some pages the 5th years are working on. I'd go mad. I like my course and I appreciate it now I've seen the awfulness of what you have to put up with. It's so impossible. I'd hate to be the corrector for it, since there seemed to be an almost infinite number of ways to answer the question I was shown. Well not really, but it was kind of absurd how many ways there were.