The 3B MAT course finished spot on 13 weeks (I used the remaining 6 weeks for revision and consolidation), which bodes well for the year 12 students moving into the course next year. The second semester is longer to cater for combined year 11/12 classes.
The 3B MAS course ran right down to the line finishing in 17 weeks and the vectors course was barely completed. It is quite full with Trig Identities and Vectors taking up large wads of time to do properly.
Some of my yr 11 3B MAS students are repeating 3B MAS in year 12 (with me again) and I need to lift the pace a little to make sure there is a little more revision time.
3B MAT exam
We used an external exam and the students were able to easily complete the project networks, correlation, linear programming, moving averages, optimisation and simple differentiation questions. Next year when teaching 3B MAT we will need to focus on interpreting graphs and their derivatives, conjectures and applications of differentiation. I'm happy with the two results over 80% (out of 10 students), but kicking myself that I missed one of the students that fell under 30%. I should have picked this one up sooner.
In particular I would find an alternate text to teach problem solving/conjectures with as the Saddler text is a little short on this topic.
In general I am pleased with their results (pat on the back guys) as I gave little in the way of exam tips (I didn't do the exam beforehand for fear of giving too much away!) and there was a 6-8% average increase across the class.
3B MAS exam
Urgh! The lack of revision showed, compared to the MAT paper. The exam also showed that working consistently through the year can work, with marks between the most gifted student and the conscientious student closing to just 3 marks in the calculator section. More work in vectors is required for the three students repeating next year to improve their C&D's to higher marks. They showed great improvement in the calculus sections of the test. With a bit more experience, they should be better able to identify what methods to apply to what questions. My results are skewed to the left with more C & D's than A & B's, but with 5 students, it would be a surprise to get a true bell curve (I would have liked it skewed more the other way!).
The MAS paper was a bit narrow compared to the MAT paper.. I would have liked to see more opportunity to show what they knew - rather than the imbalance of an overly large number of marks for questions that only an A or B student would be able to complete. Some questions were very misleading in their no. of marks compared to the actual work/knowledge required to complete them. Yet this is the price to pay for using external exams to judge how well the course is being delivered.
On to reports now!
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