Is methods 3/4 a big jump from 1/2?

[a weaponized ikea chair]

Doing it next year, and want to know if I will do decent.

So far in methods, I've done decent.

How hard is methods in comparison to 1/2 in terms of content?

P.s Combinations i really struggled in 1/2.

[samja05]

[a weaponized ikea chair]

Sorry, I did not mean to be pretentious or anything.

I posted my scores because I thought it might help if I will struggle in 3/4 next year.

Sorry, I will remove them.

[james.358]

Hey a weaponized ikea chair,

Nothing wrong with being proud of your achievements. Your initial post is fine, just ignore the toxic comments.

I was in a similar boat to you almost exactly a year ago in terms of grades. I was overconfident and thought Methods 3/4 will be similarly easy. Well, it certainly didn't go as I imagined at the start of the year. Some of my other accelerated friends and I started the year on a B+, as we weren't ready for the jump in difficulty and the pace. We all worked back to the ~95% mark by year's end, but there is definitely a noticeable difficulty in content.

From the thoughtful questions you have asked and your other posts, you certainly seem like a bright and dedicated student that has the potential to obtain the top scores next year.

Good luck!
James

[colline]

Agree with James above - nothing wrong with posting your scores if you think it provides some helpful context to your situation.

In my opinion, I found the biggest jump to be from year 10 to methods 1/2, while the transition from 1/2 to 3/4 was quite smooth and wasn't too difficult. Personally I even found 3/4 to be a little easier, and I certainly had much higher SAC averages in 3/4 than 1/2.

I think the main things are - one, to understand how the topics flow from one to another - you learn many different topics in 3/4 (mostly a continuation of 1/2) and while they may appear as disjointed concepts at first, understanding one will aid with another. I found understanding how every chapter connects helped me out massively in year 12. The other thing is to make sure you don't burn out. I have a feeling many high achievers in 1/2 find 3/4 harder isn't because the content is more difficult, but rather because they burnt out.

If you continue with the study methods that worked for you in 1/2, I think you will do just fine! All the best with year 12

[S_R_K]

One difficulty with commenting on the transition from 1/2 to 3/4 is that the 1/2 course is not the same across schools. Even though all schools are, officially, meant to do the same study design, different schools will cover the content in different sequences, spend different amounts of time on different topics, have different difficulties and numbers of assessments, perhaps include or exclude certain bits of content depending on relevance for 3/4, etc.

Your best guide is to ask your teachers for how well students at your level in 1/2 performed in 3/4, and also to ask other students at your school.

[The Cat In The Hat]

The thing I found most difficult was looking at a question and seeing ok, what would I use here? (I think that's synthesising the information or something?) Personally, I was ok at each topic, but had to do a lot of practise to do even vaguely decently on actual exams; other than that the jump wasn't too bad, for me. However, my school we also didn't do integration at all in year 11, having run out of time, which led to issues this year. So I would say if you've done decently in 1/2, you're likely to do decently in 3/4 if you put the work in and practise exam questions as well as just textbook ones.
Also note: providing your scores and the relative strength of your cohort would, in my opinion, be useful.

[Bri MT]

Ahh yes, providing us your scores is totally be relevant to your question.

Can we just make a board for all the humble braggers at this point? For this and the other million "I'm SAC rank no1 and 100% every trial exam can I still get a 50?" posts.

To answer your question, methods 3/4 is not much harder than 1/2. Whether you will "do decent" depends on how much effort you're willing to put in rather than the inherent difficulty of the course.

It's a (not perfect) metric of how the person is finding the course so even though it isn't needed it does fit with the context. Also note that people can still be anxious, unsure, and want reassurance even with high scores so what you are seeing as humblebragging could be them humblebragging but it could also just be someone looking for a bit of reassurance and help. I would rather default to "how can I help this person" and assuming good intentions.

I don't want to go too off-topic here but some people also come from environments where they aren't very familiar with how rank, SAC marks, exam scores etc. all combine together so what might seem "obvious and therefore attention seeking" to one person might not be the case for others. There are threads made for when results come out; a lot of celebration happens in those threads.

Thanks everyone for addressing a weaponized ikea chair's question

[samja05]

Sorry, I did not mean to be toxic or anything.

I posted there because I thought it will help.

Sorry, I will remove them.

[Chessnutter]

It is a big jump, but not from content - I found the content similar enough. There is a big jump in required understanding, however, so when doing practice questions make sure you are understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. A thorough understanding is what VCAA tests on the exams, and are considered the 'hard' questions because most students do not have a good enough level of understanding to apply the basic rules. An example would be the last question on Methods Exam 1 for this year, trivial if you had an understanding of inverses and where their intersections would be with the function (on the link y=x), but VERY difficult otherwise. On a side note, a lot of shortcuts to questions can be taken in questions to save time if you understand what you are doing, especially in regards to symmetry.

[a weaponized ikea chair]

Thanks everyone for your input  . Its cleared things up a bit.

I've had a deeper look at the textbook and the first half seems like stuff we already did, but the latter half (especially the distributions and the like) seems a bit intimidating.