How To Improve

This page contains a collection of resources that you can use to help you improve and will be added to as the year goes on.

Need to Know facts

  • The Knowledge is a list of results that you need to know off by heart - either because you are not given them in the formula booklet or because you need to have them at your fingertips to recognise them. The best way to learn these is by writing down from memory on the document as much as you can using The Knowledge Answers to check.

Past Paper Practice - Current Specification

Now you have covered all the AS Single Maths Pure material, you should make sure you are fully confident with this by using past papers. You can use both MEI past papers and OCR past papers. Please ignore the Mechanics and Stats questions for now.

Topic Specific Resources

At this stage, most of your practice will be topic specific. This may change later in the year when working through past papers will become more effective.

  • You are able to find practice past paper questions on a specific topics at ALevelMathsRevision.com, which is a great website - they have resources for both Single Maths and Further Maths that are selected to be suitable for our specification. Each sheet has accompanying mark scheme solutions.
  • Integral Maths is a very good option and has not only worksheets with full solutions but also video explanations to help recap topics that are causing more problems.
  • The Edexcel Textbooks have been uploaded in pdf form by someone on Reddit to this Google Drive. The Single Maths books have a 98% overlap with our specification. The Further Maths books don't match as perfectly but will still be great for extra questions on some topics.
  • MadAsMaths - the "Maths Booklets" section has excellent, challenging topic-specific questions with full written solutions. It can be a little difficult to navigate so go here for integration, here for trigonometry, and here for other Single Pure topics. For Futher Pure topics you can find sheets on complex numbers, roots of polynomials and special sums here.
  • Physics and Maths Tutor also has topic specific pages with cheat sheets as well as selected questions.

Planning on applying for Oxford or Cambridge?

If you are serious about wanting to apply to Oxford or Cambridge (other other top unis) for maths then you need to start putting the extra work in early. The first step should be making sure you can smash the past papers linked above. But you also need to be able to apply these ideas in more difficult scenarios - there are a few ideal resources for this that you should already start using:

  • The Oxford Maths entrance paper (MAT) only used material you have already seen and has past papers going all the way back to 2007 on the official Oxford website. I would recommend saving the most recent few years until nearer the time but that still gives you plenty of practice.
  • Senior Maths Challenge past papers going back to 1998 can be found in this Google Drive along with solutions. These don't need A Level knowledge but are great for building problem solving skills.
  • The Cambridge Maths entrance paper (STEP) is intimidating but the best place to start is the STEP Support Programme - because the STEP papers can be scary, this programme tries to ease you in by giving smaller assignments that build in difficulty. You will be able to to most of the Foundation programme with the material you already know (but save the STEP 2 and STEP 3 modules until you have seen more maths later in the year.
  • A former STEP chief examiner wrote this incredible free online book. It was specifically written to help candidates prepare and to give them an insight into how to think through each question.

Videos

You can find quick videos on a few of the topics on my Youtube channel - if you go to the playlists they are organised by paper.

There are also incredible videos by TL Maths - these cover every single topic from both Single Maths and Further Core Pure. He has a Youtube channel but the videos on his website are amazingly organised and easy to navigate, with a Single Maths page and a Further Core Pure page.