ATAR Prediction (based off prelim results) + Help with Subject Concerns (1 Viewer)

[JayIntel2232]

Hey guys, So basically this year in preliminary I did really well in all my subjects. I have picked up 4U maths but I am not sure if its right for me, even though i did good in 3u this year and I enjoy maths. I go to a selective school so the competition in subjects is high and 48 people do 4U maths, and they all seem to be adapting to the harder concepts much easier than me.

I don't need to do 4U in terms of the required 10 units for HSC as I completed IPT in 2018 as an accelerated course, giving me a total of 11 units. Below are my marks for preliminary and my IPT HSC 2018.

Please give advice on whether I should keep 4U or, do 3U and use IPT towards my ATAR.
An ATAR prediction based on my current preliminary marks would be motivating

2019 Preliminary
English Advanced 80/100 - Rank 84/156
Mathematics Advanced 94/100 - Rank 18/152
Mathematics Extension 1 48/50 - Rank 2/118 (I think this rank might be wrong, cause i was ranked 90/118 in first semester, but it was on my report so oh well)
Business Studies 97/100 - Rank 1/45
Economics 97/100 - Rank 1/45

2018 HSC
IPT - Internal 92/100, External 94/100, 93 B6

 

[fernsqurrel]

If you are excelling in math at such a high level, I would strongly suggest keeping 4u math. Doing well in 4u will extremely benefit ur final ATAR due to the amazing scaling it provides. I had 160 people doing 4 unit in my grade and even being at the lower end of the grade will guarantee a good high mark so don't worry if it's hard at the start!! Keep grinding!!! Based on your ranks and going to a selective school I would say an ATAR of 97-98 would be fair, the only thing being English which if you could improve, would benefit ur ATAR extremely. Good luck for year 12!!

 

[andrew12678]

they all seem to be adapting to the harder concepts much easier than me.

I think this sounds like perhaps they've learnt the content in advance i.e. at some tutoring centre rather than just pure ability, from my experience such advantages don't have that much of an impact after sufficient practice. Several past papers in and you might be even better at 4U than individuals who grasped the content easier.

As for an ATAR estimate, I wouldn't recommend this based solely on preliminary marks as it is quite different from HSC. A better estimate could be attained by translating those ranks (not marks) over to Year 12 and seeing what kind of scores people in those ranks have achieved the past few years.

Anyways, my last bit of advice would be to maybe focus more attention to English as that is arguably more vital to the ATAR from my perspective

 

[pockysticks]

I think this sounds like perhaps they've learnt the content in advance i.e. at some tutoring centre rather than just pure ability, from my experience such advantages don't have that much of an impact after sufficient practice. Several past papers in and you might be even better at 4U than individuals who grasped the content easier.

As for an ATAR estimate, I wouldn't recommend this based solely on preliminary marks as it is quite different from HSC. A better estimate could be attained by translating those ranks (not marks) over to Year 12 and seeing what kind of scores people in those ranks have achieved the past few years.

Anyways, my last bit of advice would be to maybe focus more attention to English as that is arguably more vital to the ATAR from my perspective

Sorry this is a little off topic but the first part that you wrote really resonated with me. I have just finished a term of 4u and I feel like I have no confidence in my maths abilities, because people that go tutoring that learn content ahead are always able to answer q's that our teacher asks when we do new content. Do you think it's a good idea to study ahead or just go at the pace of school but make sure that all hw is completed along with challenging questions?

 

[JayIntel2232]

Sorry this is a little off topic but the first part that you wrote really resonated with me. I have just finished a term of 4u and I feel like I have no confidence in my maths abilities, because people that go tutoring that learn content ahead are always able to answer q's that our teacher asks when we do new content. Do you think it's a good idea to study ahead or just go at the pace of school but make sure that all hw is completed along with challenging questions?

Hi, it’s the OP again. I have spoken to my year advisor and multiple teachers who have said to keep 4u and I have decided to. I have noticed that by studying the topics more and devoting more time, I am actually at the same level, if not higher than the others that do tutoring. I do tutoring for 3U maths but not 4U as I am waiting for my exam and the mark I receive from it to decided whether to pick up tutoring or not.
Just note that a 60-70 in 4U scales to a 95 which is insane.
Based on what you are saying, don’t be intimidated by others, at the end of the day if they learn all the content ahead of you externally and you learn it at school, you will still know the same things, given you do homework and study hard. My friend has completed the 4U syllabus from his tutoring and tells me stories of year 9s doing 4u maths tutoring. Keep grinding, you will notice yourself if you need tutoring or not, I.e. if your rank drops significantly but if you are getting above 50% in 4u tests, your doing good.

 

[andrew12678]

Sorry this is a little off topic but the first part that you wrote really resonated with me. I have just finished a term of 4u and I feel like I have no confidence in my maths abilities, because people that go tutoring that learn content ahead are always able to answer q's that our teacher asks when we do new content. Do you think it's a good idea to study ahead or just go at the pace of school but make sure that all hw is completed along with challenging questions?

Well the more practice you get in the better so by all means go study ahead if you it means you get in more practice, basically the key to 4U is having been exposed to all the tricks (which means having gone through as many past papers as possible-I'll even throw in an extra tip, once you get to a stage where you know the content off by heart you should just scan through papers and look for hard questions that you haven't seen before and if you get any wrong/can't do them just read the solution, screenshot the question + solution and then come back to it closer to an exam.

However, that being said, I did not study that much 4U in the Summer holidays you have coming up because I used all my time on perfecting my English essays and creatives (the ones which would be examined in the half yearly exam in Term 1 next year) and I believe this is an essential checklist time you probably want to tick off before indulging in any form of mathematics

 

[pikachu975]

Hey guys, So basically this year in preliminary I did really well in all my subjects. I have picked up 4U maths but I am not sure if its right for me, even though i did good in 3u this year and I enjoy maths. I go to a selective school so the competition in subjects is high and 48 people do 4U maths, and they all seem to be adapting to the harder concepts much easier than me.

I don't need to do 4U in terms of the required 10 units for HSC as I completed IPT in 2018 as an accelerated course, giving me a total of 11 units. Below are my marks for preliminary and my IPT HSC 2018.

Please give advice on whether I should keep 4U or, do 3U and use IPT towards my ATAR.
An ATAR prediction based on my current preliminary marks would be motivating

2019 Preliminary
English Advanced 80/100 - Rank 84/156
Mathematics Advanced 94/100 - Rank 18/152
Mathematics Extension 1 48/50 - Rank 2/118 (I think this rank might be wrong, cause i was ranked 90/118 in first semester, but it was on my report so oh well)
Business Studies 97/100 - Rank 1/45
Economics 97/100 - Rank 1/45

2018 HSC
IPT - Internal 92/100, External 94/100, 93 B6

Just wanna give you some motivation that I didn’t get tutoring for maths ext 2 and in the first semester I was struggling hard with complex numbers and graphs. I was ready to give up honestly I thought this 2 unit subject wouldn’t be worth the time but it is. Firstly it’s really hard so it improves your problem solving, and also makes ur maths ext 1 count as 2 units. Tbh since maths ext 2 was so hard it made maths ext 1 feel so easy not gonna lie. Anyway it’s worth the time. Pretty sure I was struggling hard initially but it gets better. In my 3rd trial (we had 3 sets of trials in 2017 for our school) I got around 77 raw iirc then I worked rly hard and got 90+ raw / 97 final mark for hsc so good luck )

 

[catha230]

Just wanna give you some motivation that I didn’t get tutoring for maths ext 2 and in the first semester I was struggling hard with complex numbers and graphs. I was ready to give up honestly I thought this 2 unit subject wouldn’t be worth the time but it is. Firstly it’s really hard so it improves your problem solving, and also makes ur maths ext 1 count as 2 units. Tbh since maths ext 2 was so hard it made maths ext 1 feel so easy not gonna lie. Anyway it’s worth the time. Pretty sure I was struggling hard initially but it gets better. In my 3rd trial (we had 3 sets of trials in 2017 for our school) I got around 77 raw iirc then I worked rly hard and got 90+ raw / 97 final mark for hsc so good luck )

Wow. It’s so inspiring to know that not all BOS Maths beasts are prodigies. Could you please further elaborate on how you self-study 4u Maths? Thank you so much in advance

 

[pikachu975]

Wow. It’s so inspiring to know that not all BOS Maths beasts are prodigies. Could you please further elaborate on how you self-study 4u Maths? Thank you so much in advance

Hi! Instead of just spamming out past papers and checking the solutions I tried to improve after each paper. So after a few papers it should be clear what your weaknesses are and for me it was mainly time (which was improved by doing more papers) but also doing the hard questions. Instead of just looking at solutions and being like "oh yeah this makes sense", I tried to think "hmm what info did they look at in the question and what thoughts could they have had to do these steps". From this it helped a lot with thinking of how to approach future questions and eventually the hard questions that I thought were impossible suddenly became doable over time. Anyway I still did around 20 papers before the HSC for maths ext 2 so it's not like I didn't do much study for it!

Doing maths ext 2 also made maths ext 1 extremely easy which is a bonus! Developing problem solving in maths ext 2 makes the hard questions of maths ext 1 feel really easy. Also I forgot to mention I learnt the basics of each topic via textbook questions which our teacher assigned, then developed the understanding better through papers.

 

[pockysticks]

Well the more practice you get in the better so by all means go study ahead if you it means you get in more practice, basically the key to 4U is having been exposed to all the tricks (which means having gone through as many past papers as possible-I'll even throw in an extra tip, once you get to a stage where you know the content off by heart you should just scan through papers and look for hard questions that you haven't seen before and if you get any wrong/can't do them just read the solution, screenshot the question + solution and then come back to it closer to an exam.

However, that being said, I did not study that much 4U in the Summer holidays you have coming up because I used all my time on perfecting my English essays and creatives (the ones which would be examined in the half yearly exam in Term 1 next year) and I believe this is an essential checklist time you probably want to tick off before indulging in any form of mathematics

Hi do you mind sharing how you prepared for English and improved in the holidays?

 

[andrew12678]

HSC english back in my day was Paper 1 Area of Study: 1 essay, 1 creative and 1 reading task. Paper 2: 3 essays modules A,B,C. I've believe some of this is still intact in this new syllabus but with some things changed quite a lot (module C). So I guess you can adjust what I did to whatever is relevant now.

Essentially you want to find out what your English department is going to assess in Half Yearlies (I recall this is either at the end of Term 1 or early term 2). For me this was AoS Essay and Module A essays. So my objective for the holidays with respect to English was to finish both of these essays. My school spent most of Term 1 going through Module A so I was definitely going ahead on my own which was not too difficult since I had read all my texts in Year 11 + I had plenty of exemplary resources and help at hand (note: I went to Delta).

I had this friend who was doing the same thing as well (doing it early) and we would have very fruitful discussions and help each other through the challenge throughout the holiday. But do note that we did this not because we wanted to get it done and not worry about it again. We did this so that we could get as much feedback as possible from teachers (I submitted and tutors (we made good use of Delta's essay submission)