Hi there,

Can someone please give some advice on what is the best method of preparation to take STEP 2 and 3? What are the types of grades you can get, and how do they compare with normal A Level maths. Is the knowledge and techniques transferable, or do you have to be in a different state of mind to tackle STEP with the objective of doing well.

Hal.

Well the way that I prepared was to do lots and lots of past papers. That's about it really.

The material is supposed to be the same as for A-level Maths and Further Maths, so if you're already doing double Maths then you should in theory have all the material for doing the questions. There will almost certainly be things that you need to know that you haven't covered in lessons, as the A-level syllabuses seem to vary quite a lot. For me it was the harder bits of Stats and Mechanics - stuff like moment generating functions and moments of inertia. If you're doing a course which doesn't do any Stats or doesn't do any Mechanics then you'd probably do best just to ignore that completely - I wouldn't recommend trying to learn it all from scratch and there are a good choice of questions anyway.

The grades you can get are 3, 2, 1 and S (anything below a 3 and you don't pass). I don't know anything about how the grades work other than that.

So basically just get the past papers and do loads of questions. Expect them to be very hard to start with, but once you work out how to do one particular question, chances are there will be other questions on different years' papers which use the same ideas.

Of course if you get really stuck then you can ask NRICH people.

Enjoy!
James.

What was the OCR syllabus gives the mark scheme. Something like:

S - outstanding
I - excellent
II - very good
III - satisfactory

A perfect question (i.e. one were you demonstrate you totally understand what there getting at) gets an alpha, an ordinary attempt gets you a beta. Roughly five perfect questions on a paper will get you a I. If I recall correcetly a beta is worth approximately 0.5 an alpha.

The only advice I can give is:
- get a syllabus
- get loads of past papers and do them
- get Dr Siklos' book and do it
- get a decent teacher to mark them

Learning to do STEP questions/Cambridge maths questions is a bit like learning to do crossword puzzles, at first they seem impossible but the same old tricks come up over and over again.

Everyone I know who did STEP got better grades than they expected.

Thanks James & Anon for the advice.

Roughly how many questions are there in each paper. How many do you have to answer?

James which board did you do for your A-Levels?
You said that if your syllabus does not cover certain material, can you still get high grades in it, for example, extended stats and mech.

Where can I get a copy of the syllabus for 2001. Does the syllabus vary from year to year or remain the same?

I was wondering what % of people who get offers for math, get the grades in their STEP and thus get in?

There are 14 questions (8 pure, 3 mechanics, 3 statistics) of which you choose 6 to answer. All questions carry equal weighting. In all of my papers, I chose 5 pure and 1 mechanics (personally I think the mechanics ones are easier than the pure but you do have to know the material) but a lot of people stick to pure.

I don't have the syllabus I'm afraid, but it will remain pretty much the same each year, I'd have thought. As for the percentage of people passing STEP, I can't speak for other colleges, but Trinity say in their prospectus that they make 4 offers for every 3 places. (But the 1 person in 4 not ending up there may also be because they turned down their offer, or missed the A-Level grades.)

It was three years ago that I did STEP so I don't remember it all that well, but one thing I do remember is that the difficulty of the questions seemed to vary a lot - some questions were really horrible and others could be answered very quickly, so I think that it's hard to say which out of pure, stats and mechanics are harder.

My board only didn't cover a few things, and I learnt them for STEP, although as you can see from the number of questions, it is perfectly feasible to do it even if you, say, don't know any mechanics.

James.

Thanks Michael and James for your input. Much appreciated.

Yes, there seems to be a wide choice of flavors, depending whether you like pure or mech. Assume that the paper contains so called 'easier' questions, and you do them well, will it be good for your chances or do you try to pick some hard and some easy ones? Do you see what I mean?

The rubrik says all questions are worth equal credit

I wouldn't have thought that it would make any difference to your mark if you choose what you think to be easier questions - there should be equal marks available for each question.

I didn't want to mislead you by saying what I did about the difficulty of questions. Most questions will be of middling difficulty, and the easy ones are probably in general things which you can do easily if you know how, but not if you don't, if you see what I mean.

I wouldn't worry too much now about the structure of the exam. Perhaps think about that a bit a few weeks in advance and plan a strategy, but for now I'd just say do some past questions. There should be 280 from papers 2 and 3 over the last decade, so there's no shortage to practice on!

James.

The current structure for step: three papers, with I being a good deal easier than the other two is quite recent. From about '96 I think. Before that there were just two papers I think, they were slightly harder but very similar.

Ouch! 280! Its a long stair case!!
'Roughly' how many past papers do you think you should do to be in good condition to so STEP well. How many did you fellows do? James, Michael, Anon?

At a guess, I'd say I'd probably done most of the questions from the previous 5 years, so about 100 in total? That could be wildly out - I really can't remember very well. But they're really fun (or at least I thought so), much more interesting than A-level, so I didn't mind doing them at all.

I'll second that, I did the Siklos booklet (50 questions of difficulty ranging from easy I to hard III) and about 5 years worth of IIs and IIIs, any more than that is unnecessary. However, some people I know didn't do any and did OK, but I wouldn't recommend that.

Although I agree with Michael in general that the Mechanics ones are easier in general, you do get the odd gem amongst the pure. There was one group theory one I remember quite well (which is of course no use if you haven't studied group theory) in which you had to prove that a group G of order p has no subgroups apart from 0 and G if p is prime. It had a second part of about the same difficulty which I can't remember, all in all the question took about 4 minutes and 6 lines or so. Unfortunately I didn't get any like that in the exam!

I'm amazed that anyone other than a complete genius could not do any preparation and still do well. The questions took me forever to start with before I'd done loads of practice.

I don't really remember what the questions were like in our year. I don't remember any really easy ones. I remember there was one question which had a major error, which could have been quite bad had I wasted a lot of time on it, but luckily I just gave up quickly and moved on.

Well, I actually focused on step III and only did a few step II questions. One thing is that you certainly don't need to attempt 6 questions to do well, particularly in recent years, I didn't and still got in comfortably. The marks are out of twenty for each question, the mark scheme I have not seen, but completed questions are weighted so that achieving 16 you actually get 17, 17 you get 19, 18 you get 21, 19 you get 23, 20 you get 25, (or something like that).
They mark all questions you hand in, and then award you marks for the best six. That's about it on how it works.
I feel that after you have done enough papers to know what type of questions are 'easy' for you then you start trying to do only about 2/3 of the questions on each paper. I focused on step III largely, which seems to work (must have attempted most of the questions on the last 15 years or so).
Oh, and one other thing, you are NOT expected to know all the material for STEP III. Double maths courses vary lots, and they basically use knowledge that exists in any of the courses, not necessarily all.

Hope that helps

Susan

Just one second guys, is that 100 questions or 100 papers?? Hey, you people coould be magicians!!

Would it be worth getting some degree level books and learn. Will this help with STEP tricks? If so which ones?

Questions!

No, degree level books will not help at all (or I wouldn't think so).

James.

Thanks for those tips Susan,

Just out of interest what did you guys get in you STEP? And when did you do them?

Took them in 1998, got two 'S's.

If each is worth 20 points, then how many correspond to each grade 3,2,1,S?

James = Genius! Thats so cool!

What is the address of where I can get STEP papers and syllabus from? Is it better to work through papers or the Dr Silkos book?

Each is worth 25 and it varies from year to year (and more from step paper to step paper).

If you would like copies of past papers or of the Regulations and Syllabuses booklet, contact:

OCR Publications,
Mill Wharf
Mill Street
Birmingham B6 4BU

Fax. 01223 552930

Also: http://www.meikleriggs.totalserve.co.uk/stepmaths/index.htm

has past papers.

I found STEP II to be the hardest by a long way. It needs less knowledge than STEP III, but I think STEP III involves relatively elementary application of the knowledge.

Susan is right about not having to do 6 questions perfectly. In the STEP III paper last year 4 correct answers would earn you an S. I don't think it is normally this low; this surprises me as I thought that it was easier than normal last year. Typically the S boundary is around:

100/120 (STEP I)
85/120 (STEP II)
90/120 (STEP III)

You are never asked for an S though by Cambridge. The very highest offer you can get is 1,1 in Maths II,III. And if you miss your grades you can still get in - it has happened that people have got a U in STEP III and still got in (though this technique is obviously not to be recommended...)

Finally: my favourite STEP question ever. It had a last part saying something like:

"Hence show that 4 + 7 + 11 = 22."

Sadly it did not say "hence or otherwise". You had to do it by quoting some polynomial identity (proved in the first part of the question), then differentiating it and setting x = 1. It took me ages to figure out!

Thank you James, Susan and Micheal for your advice and time. You have given me first hand insight into the mind of STEP. Thank You!

What did you guys get offered? Michael, Susan, James, Anon. Did you think you'd get the STEP grades you needed? Did you know that Warwick Uni also ask for STEP?

Overall, after doing/preparing for STEP how much on a scale of 1-10 do you think your maths improved?

In general the better colleges offer 1,1 or 1,2 (Though most are likely to accept a 1,2 result), the less good colleges general accept 2,2 or even occasionally 2,3. I have a friend who basically flunked step, (I think it was a 2,3) but still got into a reasonable college, largely on other achievements of his though. Yes I knew about warwick, and no it didn't bother me in the slightest, I would have beeen very upset not achieving a 1 in step II let alone not achieving a 3. I got offered a 1,1 and exspected to get it, and though I'm not sure how much maths generally improved, (I'm sure it did quite a bit), it certainly allowed me to quickly get into the level of thought required at uni.

I was given a 1,2 offer, and wasn't at all confident of having got those grades after the exams. Robinson now offer 1,1 I believe. There was someone from my old school who applied to Robinson the year after me who only got 1,2 and didn't get in.

I also applied to Warwick and they gave me a STEP offer. I didn't accept their offer though.

I'm sure my Maths improved as a result of doing STEP, but I wouldn't like to say how much.

James.

Thanks James.
After you do you STEP, when do you get your results? Is it when the ALevels results come out or otherwise?

"The better colleges"?? Is there such a thing as a bad college in Cambridge?

My offer was a 2 in STEP III (+ AAB in A Level). I was pretty confident I'd obtain that. (What I wasn't confident about was getting an offer in the first place.)

As I remember Warwick ask for a 2 in any STEP. (So if you take more than one paper it is the best grade that counts.) In fact I think they don't actually interview anyone - they simply offer AAB + 2 to anyone who applies. Warwick were my second choice, because I liked the look of their course.

"better colleges" ~ "richer colleges"? perhaps I am cruel.

STEP offers vary depeding on your interview. I got offered AAA + 2 in Step II or III or AAB + 1 in Step II or III. Most people at my college got offers of AAA + 2 1s. Having said that everyone who got a place achieved AAA + 2 1s or better.

Michael - how did your interview go, when you had it. how do they decide on whether what offer they give you, if they give you one?

How is it to study at Cam? I mean the atmosphere etc? Can you pursue your interests as well as your studies? Or is there no time? What about societies? How many of them and how do you get into one? Do you get to know people from other colleges? or only ones from your college? How are the lectures conducted? How much self drive is needed to succeed?

Hal - I'm not sure how they decide what offer to give you. (Frankly I wasn't bothered about what offer I got as long as it didn't include chemistry; just getting an offer was my aim.) The lowest offer you can get is EE (Christ's College give this to 1/3 of the people they give offers to, in each subject). Most colleges don't often go below ABB. The college that always gives out high offers (and therefore more of them) are Trinity Hall, who always ask for AAA and then either 1,1 or 1,2 in STEP II and III.

If you want to have a look at Cambridge societies go here . To get into them you simply have to sign your name on a piece of paper in the first week. (Typically you join everything in sight, then don't turn up at absolutely everythng.) There are also societies on a college level.

Another query, roughly when did you start doing STEP practise? And how many hours did you put in before you sat the test?

I did about 2 hours a week for 6 months before the exam.