High School these days...

We were only allowed three, plus General Studies A level. I did Pure Maths, Applied Maths and Physical Science.

Reply to
Bob Eager
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It might well have been by then - after all they stopped teaching arithmetic when calculators arrived. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

That's interesting. That could explain why my son's Uni give them all a Maths test in the first week. I wondered why A/A in Maths/Further Maths was not good enough.

Reply to
Mark

That was similar for us, in 1978... Top set maths did the maths O-level a year early, and then Additional Maths. Middle set did just the O-level. Bottom set did the O-level, and CSE as a back-up in some cases.

I'm pretty sure matrices were in our O-level though, and stats and probability. The O-level included some calculus, but you needed to know more calculus than O-level maths covered to do O-level Physics, hence the Additional Maths lessons.

IIRC, this was Oxford and Cambridge exam board. I have a very vague recollection that bottom set maths may have done a different exam board which was claimed to be easier and didn't have things like calculus, Joint Matriculation Board?

I also recall bottom set for Physics did CSE, which included things like house wiring, which we didn't cover in O-level physics. Even back then I was well into wiring, and recall being a bit miffed that we didn't cover it!

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

I've been using my old maths O level textbooks with my son, who's doing second year A levels.

Mind you, I did the JMB maths syllabus. Even when we got to Uni, we had 1st year maths courses under the broad title, "You JMB lot just sit and twiddle your thumbs, whilst we bring the other boards up to speed."

Reply to
Andy Dingley

AO was an O Level style syllabus, but aimed at an older student I believe the idea was.

I seem to recall similar difficulties when I did mine at FE college... Did Physics and Computer science, but did not really fancy doing maths which would have possibly been the normal counterpart. So in the end settled for doing some additional O levels at the same time (electronics, and chemistry was the plan - but timetabling issues made continuing the chemistry a problem). We also got entered for AO computer studies half way through the A level course for some reason.

Reply to
John Rumm

I remember doing some matrices in O level (early 80's), but it was covered in not quite enough detail to actually be useful - such that they seemed not to be able to give any practical example of what you might want to use them for. I don't think I learnt about inverting a matrix, until doing a higher level BTEC maths courses years later, and and then covering applications in signal processing etc after that.

We did CSEs in parallel for some subjects - I saw the physics one (I was too young to actually sit it, and since I already had the O level when I was 14 there was not much point) I don't think there was much if any house wiring in ours. Not sure what exam board it was though... AEB possibly.

Reply to
John Rumm

I am sure we did some simple differentiation at O level... I did stats as an "extra" one since I had a couple of spare terms. (which was quite entertaining, since there were three of us doing it for the first time, and that included the teacher!)

Yup I remember picking up an ICT A level text book in Waterstones some years back and being horrified at how little actual content was in it.

Reply to
John Rumm

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wrote a simulator for a continuous fermenter where one bacterium grew on

More the the point, the 10% of useful stuff may not be the same 10% for everyone.

Reply to
John Rumm

There is also a deeper benefit in that it teaches a student how to gain a much deeper understanding of themselves - to identify your own strengths and weaknesses etc.

Reply to
John Rumm

Back in '73 I did my A-level in maths - and the questions then were more or less identical to first-year university maths from before 1939. I used a pre-war university textbook as a mugging aid - and it served me well.

Some aspects were different - we did statistics and applied (think we covered the full syllabus though it was allowed to do only statistics or only applied).

Matrices came in the year below me - and I never did get into them at school.

Reply to
polygonum

Comp Sci was actually quite rare at A level in our day... IIRC when I took mine ('87) there were less than 120 students in the country taking the exam (not sure if that was just our exam board, or all combined)

With emphasis on the "little" - you can normally identify the ones you have no aptitude for fairly quickly ;-)

Reply to
John Rumm

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Reply to
zhengkaiyan60

I did simple differentiation and integration at age 11.

It was certainly part of O level, examination wise.

A level was partial differential eqautions and bloody series and matrices.

I saw my nieces O level maths papers and frankly it wasn't even 11+ standard.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Absolutely. I met someone who knew someone who really needed to use divs grads and curls - to design microwave cavities waveguides and so on.

Asa n analogue electronics designer,. little more than simple differentiation and integration and the ability to understand exponents was required.

Digital circuit designers needed even less. They can't even count beyond one. Which is why they have serious difficulty with bus timings and the like.

:-)

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The above site has this as a contact email - suggest sending some abuse there:

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

I just did...

Reply to
Tim Watts

Yup, that would concur...

I was glad of the matrices when I had to do higher levels of maths - I was crap at calculus, so it was an easy bit to make up some marks on ;-)

Reply to
John Rumm

That was what I originally meant.

Reply to
Huge

Yes, but the feedback in this system is probably from one period to the next. That causes the time delay...

Andy

Reply to
Andy Champ

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