This is a question to ponder about, how many questions or papers to practice for Maths O Levels / A Levels for the Ten Year Series?
If you searched Google, you will find that there is no definitive answer of how many questions to practice for Maths O Levels/ A Levels anywhere on the web.
For O Level / A Level, practicing the Ten Year Series is really helpful, as it helps students to gain confidence in solving exam-type questions.
Here are some tips about how to practice the Ten Year Series (TYS):
1) Do a variety of questions from each topic. This will help you to gain familiarity with all the topics tested, and also revise the older topics.
2) Fully understand each question. If necessary, practice the same question again until you get it right. There is a sense of satisfaction when you finally master a tough question.
3) Quality is more important than quantity. It is better to do and understand 1 question completely than do many questions but not understanding them.
Back to the original query of how many questions or papers to practice for Maths O Levels / A Levels for the Ten Year Series, I will attempt to give a rough estimate here, based on personal experience.
5 Questions done (full questions worth more than 5 marks) will result in an improvement of roughly 1 mark in the final exam.
(The 5 Questions must be fully understood. )
So, if a student wants to improve from 40 marks to 70 marks, he/she should try to do 30×5=150 questions (around 7 years worth of past year papers). Repeated questions are counted too, so doing 75 questions (around 3 years worth of past year papers) twice will also count as doing 150 questions. In fact, that is better for students with weak foundation, as the repetition reinforces their understanding of the techniques used to solve the question.
If the student starts revision early, this may work out to just 1 question per day for 5 months. Of course, the 150 questions must be varied, and from different subject topics.
| Marks improved by |
Long Questions to be done |
Approx. Number of years of TYS |
OR (even better) |
| 10 |
50 |
2 |
1 year TYS practice twice |
| 20 |
100 |
4 |
2 year TYS practice twice |
| 30 |
150 |
6 |
3 year TYS practice twice |
| 40 |
200 |
8 |
4 year TYS practice twice |
| 50 |
250 |
10 |
5 year TYS practice twice |
This estimate only works up to a certain limit (obviously we can’t exceed 100 marks). To get the highest grade (A1 or A), mastery of the subject is needed, and the ability to solve creative questions and think out of the box.
When a student practices TYS questions, it is essential that he/she fully understands the question. This is where a tutor is helpful, to go through the doubts that the student has. Doing a question without understanding it is essentially of little use, as it does not help the student to solve similar questions should they come out in the exam.
Hope this information will help your revision.
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