10 Ways to Improve Your Maths Mark – Do you have math problems? Not to worry. Math is really crucial for university applications, so be sure to look it over here.
Getting through math, especially in matric, maybe a difficult chore, whether you’re just starting out in high school or are frantically studying for your preliminary mid-year examinations. But with a little assistance, math can be much simpler than you would have thought.
10 Ways to Improve Your Maths Mark
Here are 10 ways to improve your Maths mark.
1. Know the Techniques, Methods, and Formulae
OK, this might seem painfully obvious, but making sure that you’re well acquainted with the techniques, methods, and formulae is already a huge help.
The better you know the basics, the less work you have to try and figure out when you’re struggling with a specific problem – even when you don’t know exactly what to do. If you can apply the formula, you’re halfway there. Feeling confident with this also helps you to prevent the notorious ‘blanks’ that tend to hit on test day.
2. Make Friends with Maths
It may be a strange idea, but approaching your work with a positive attitude can make a world of a difference to your performance in the subject.
If you open your Maths book in a good headspace every time you study, you’re going to be far more productive. Make the conscious decision to learn and understand the work properly (as opposed to just learning it to pass the test). You never know, you might even surprise yourself and end up liking Maths.
3. Keep Up with the Syllabus
Make sure you always know what’s going on in class and you understand the work. That’s not to say you have to understand it the first time you see it, but if you’re struggling with a concept, go home and go over it until you understand it.
You never want to be playing the catch-up game the day before the test. Revising for tests should be just that, revising, not re-learning work you only half-understood when you learned it the first time.
Homework is the worst part of every student’s day. If you can’t sleep at school, why should you need to do schoolwork at home? But homework is a very useful way to check that you’re comfortable with the concepts you have been covering in class and to establish a more permanent foundation for these concepts in your brain.
Suggested post: List of Scholarships offered at the UCT
4. Ask for help – Not Only From Your Teacher
In Maths, there are so many different ways to explain different concepts, and in some ways will make more sense to you than others. So who do you ask, if not your teacher?
Ask your peers. Maybe there’s someone in your class who seems to be getting the work really easily – ask them what they do or what techniques they use to understand the work.
You can also ask other Maths teachers at your school, as they might have a different way of explaining a concept that you’re struggling with.
5. Go Further Than the Classroom
If you find that you’re paying attention in class and you’re doing all your work, but still not satisfied with your progress, don’t stop there. There are so many resources on the Internet to help you improve your Maths mark – more than you can imagine. So use them.
There are many written online tutorials and videos available such as online tutors. Youtube is a great tool for learning, so if you’re having trouble understanding a concept, you can often find many in-depth and clear explanatory videos there.
If you’re looking for something a little more structured, there are hundreds of free short courses that you can take on websites such as Khan Academy. You can also look at Get Smarter and Coursera.
The best thing about learning something online is that you can go over the same concept as many times as you like in your own time until you feel comfortable with it.
6. Practise, Practise, Practise
The advice every one of our Maths teachers gives us – and they’re right. Every Maths test you write is practical, so parrot-learning the theory isn’t the best strategy if you want to get really high marks.
The more you practice, the more concrete the concepts become in your head, and the more confidence you become with the work. And if you feel that you tend to underperform because you make ‘silly mistakes’, remember that the more you practice, the better you become at identifying where you’re making these errors and so you’ll start to make fewer of them.
7. Take Extra Lessons
Often, you have to spend a lot of time doing Maths to understand the work and be able to apply it confidently. And it’s not always easy to find the motivation to do this by yourself.
If your school offers extra lessons, then go to them. Having a dedicated hour or two a week to practice your Maths (and maybe pick up a few tricks or hints that the teacher shares in these lessons) can make a huge difference to your performance and to your confidence in the subject.
If your school doesn’t offer extra lessons, try to make individual arrangements with your teacher or find a private tutor. One-on-one lessons can be extremely useful because whoever is going over the work with you might be able to identify which concepts you are struggling with in particular and explain them to you in a way that you understand.
8. Do Past Papers
This is the best way to be successful in Matric. Once you have studied your syllabus and know the concepts well, do as many matric past exam papers as possible.
Teachers like to test the same work year after year, so if you’re performing well in past papers then it is likely that you will do well in your exam. The important things to remember when using past papers are to always do them under exam conditions – time yourself and don’t look at your notes or the memorandum assuming,
