It’s a good thing my first paper starts at 1.30pm.

I must admit, I’m nervous. I’ve never gone into an exam nervous. I hardly ever study during school term, but as soon as exam term hits, I always plough through exercises. Sometimes, 2 days of intense studying and I feel like I can take on anything the paper can throw at me.

But I’ve been revising STEP papers for over 2 months now, and almost exclusively doing STEP for the past two weeks. Yet I don’t feel confident doing STEP questions; half the questions I do I make a fatal (often stupid) mistake somewhere. And it’s slowly driving me mad. Whenever I slow down to do a question carefully, I end up overthinking the question. When I try to go with the flow, I miss out on a crucial point.

It’s frustrating, and I don’t like doing frustrating things.

And I can’t forget about the A-Level papers which are just lurking about. The 4 maths papers are bot too difficult, but I fear I end up forgetting some crucial thing in the middle of the exam. Too often the questions require some very specific method and while doing past papers, I sometimes forgot what to do (especially M4).

Oh, economics. It’s not part of my offers for Cambridge or Imperial. I’ve hardly studied economics over the last month. It’s not that I don’t want to, but every time I touch economics I feel guilty that my maths level isn’t up to par yet. I hate purposely neglecting a subject but I don’t have a choice here.

Maybe I should listen to my own advice and go outside. I’ve been living like a recluse the past two weeks, only leaving for the occasional lunch with friends or for necessities. Perhaps I should have gone swimming to clear my mind, or just taken an hour off to cycle around town. Something to get away from the study table.

But anyway, it’s all in the past now. In exactly 12 hours I start my exam periosteum with, perhaps, the most important paper of all (STEP 2) and on Wednesday I take STEP 3. I know that on Wednesday afternoon, once time runs out and I’m forced to put down my pen, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief, because I can finally relax. (And by relax, I mean study for the rest of the A-Level papers).

But really, I should go to sleep.

I’m happy with my results :)

By the way, if you’re interesting in the grade boundaries, look here. And if you want to know the difference between raw marks and UMS, read this.

• A*AA in A-levels, excluding Economics.
• Grade S in both STEP Paper 2 and Paper 3.

Let’s analyse:

For A-levels, I already have an A* in Mathematics so that’s in the bag. For Further Maths, I must score an average of 80% in 6 papers (called modules) out of 9 that I’m taking. (Not exactly; I already have a 97% in Further Pure 1, so the average I need for the remaining papers is slightly lower, plus I can rearrange my Mechanics 1 or 2 paper into the Further Maths grade instead of Maths if needed.)

For Physics, I currently have 295/300, or 98.33%. To get an A (80%), I need another 185/300 in A2, or 61.67%. This should not be difficult.

For Economics, I could fail it and it wouldn’t matter in terms of my offer. I’d lose all my pride though.

The STEP papers are something else. Whereas all the above are achievable (I would even dare call it… “easy”), STEP papers are… difficult. An example is in order:

STEP Paper 2 2009 Question 1

Two curves have equations x⁴ + y⁴ = u and xy = v , where u and v are positive constants. State the equations of the lines of symmetry of each curve.
The curves intersect at the distinct points A, B, C and D (taken anticlockwise from A). The coordinates of A are (α,β), where α > β > 0. Write down, in terms of α and β, the coordinates of B, C and D.
Show that the quadrilateral ABCD is a rectangle and find its area in terms of u and v only. Verify that, for the case u = 81 and v = 4, the area is 14.

There are 13 questions for each paper. 8 are pure mathematics (like the one above), 2 are probability and statistics questions, and 3 are mechanics questions. They will mark your best 6 answers to any questions, with up to 20 marks per question. In general, to get an S, I will need to answer five questions fully and a sixth partially in STEP 2, and four questions fully in STEP 3. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, the above question (and the whole of STEP 2) can be answered using only knowledge from the Mathematics A-Level subject, whereas STEP 3 requires Further Mathematics knowledge. Technically, if you’ve done your SPM Further Maths, you have enough knowledge to answer the question above. Good luck.

My entire focus for the next six months is to study sufficiently to achieve an A* in all subjects, and spending the rest of my studying time on STEP. It should be pretty fun.

Fun Fact: The full name of Trinity College is: The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

(D for distinction by the way :D)

I’m happy :) Now, it’s time to leave Malaysia. Goodbye everyone! To all my friends, family and of course, Raina, thanks for the great, awesome time while I was home!

Here’s a pile of papers after:

1. Mathematics C1
2. Mathematics M1
3. Physics Unit 1

11 more papers to go ^_^ Watch this space.

The A-levels AS paper is devious. Not only does the syllabus have the widest scope of all the subjects I’m taking, but the actual paper itself is ridiculous. 80 marks, 90 minutes; you’d think you have enough time to write down everything in your mind.

I had my mock exams last week, and for the first time, I couldn’t finish the paper. I just couldn’t. I already knew that I’d be short on time, but even though I wrote as fast as I could force myself to, I ended up not writing about 4 paragraphs worth of answers. I hate hate hate hate this feeling, it’s exactly like what I felt during the English Literature SPM paper, except that this time the subject is actually important.

Looking at my results, I scored a 60/80 for the Unit 2 paper about macro economics. A respectable score, but I lost 10 marks because I didn’t finish the paper.

-frustration-

I’m close to my limit when it comes to writing. It’s not just me, no one in my class finished every question. I don’t know what I can do to improve my writing speed. I asked my teacher about what I could do, and he said:

“Write faster.”

Thanks.

I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere which links the government, xenophobia, accelerated clocks, corruption and economics together. It’s probably true too.

SPM finished. Overall, I’d say that it was exactly as I expected, the hard papers being hard and the easy papers being easy. Only thing which surprised me was the difficulty of Add Maths paper 2 which was quite a bit tougher than I thought.

After SPM, here’s a chronicle of what happened:

Tuesday: Chemistry exams over! We went to 1 Utama to watch New Moon. I regret typing this; I suddenly remembered the really, really long 2 hours of the movie. New Moon is definitely a movie made literally just for teenage girls, and nobody else. People like me who go to watch cool vampires and werewolves to fight it out will just hate hate hate the way they make those scenes about 3 minutes long but somehow spin a lovey-dovey conversation to about 10 minutes. Mind-numbing.

8 of us watched the movie, then we met up with a bunch of other 5M students who also watched New Moon, but at the other cinema. We ate dinner at  Italliannies. Then we walked around the mall aimlessly.

Wednesday: Stuff happened. Lovely stuff.

Thursday: I got a hair cut, but otherwise, absolutely nothing happened. I wish this would happen more often.

Friday: At 6.30pm, I went to a college pre-departure briefing. I hoped to get some good info about the UK, but there was no time. I had to rush over to the Sime Darby Convention Centre at 8pm to receive an award (top scorer in Malaysia for a chemistry quiz :P. I don’t think I even remembered about the quiz until the day itself and I sure as hell didn’t study for it). Mr. Yow came too; I’ll repost two of my tweets to explain what happened:

Story me the night! Right now i’m heading to a chemistry awards night. Mr. Yow also invited. I just called him to ask him if he’s there yet.

He thought it was on the 19th. It’s fun to hear him suddenly panic when i told him it starts in about 15 minutes ^.^

Who calls an event "Malam Kimia"? It just sounds stupid.

The award came with a nice cert and RM200. Probably the best award I ever received because this one has money.

Then afterwards I had to go again to another function, this time a dinner party hosted by the EDGE. To make it short: It was funnier and better than I thought, and it ended at 11pm.

Saturday: Colleges and universities in the UK require that I take an English exam to test my m4d 3ngli5h 5k11lS. The one I sat was called the IELTS. It started at 8.45am. When my dad woke me up at 8.23am, I did this in 23 minutes:

• Wake up and not feel groggy.
• Brush my teeth.
• Wash my hair which looked like a porcupine.
• Look for my IELTS stuff.
• Change clothes.
• Run downstairs.
• Get into the car while putting on my shoes.
• Eat breakfast in the car.
• Wait for the car to reach Corus Hotel in the middle of KL.
• RUN to the hall.

I arrived at 8.45am and entered the hall at 8.46am. Any later and they wouldn’t have let me in.

The exam itself wasn’t hard at all.

After the exam, I came home. I did nothing the whole day and I’m pretty happy about that. Then I got bored and decided to update my blog.

Interesting, no?

(No.)

Nervous? Yes.

Form 4, Chapter 1

To download the whole set, click here.

If that doesn’t work, click here, but use the above one if you can. Thanks.

20:48 Y

r u coming to sch on mon or tue?

20:49 Jiann Meng

? no

20:49 Y

juz wanna inform u that u scored 97.5% in ur IKM

u r the highest

in Sri KDU n

20:49 Jiann Meng

oh ok thanks

20:50 Y

97.5% is the top marks achieved in Malaysia

http://www.mindomo.com/view?m=0313768c754a56273b7af45c3a9c4be7

Perhaps I’ll make some more?