Difficulty of NHT 2019 methods exam 1

[jinaede1342]

Just did the methods 2019 NHT exam 1 ... literally nothing like I've ever seen before
 Everything required so much effort and thinking, after seeing that I'm not sure I can pull a 25 now.
Has anyone else found the exam difficult. What % am I looking for to get a 25?

[ArtyDreams]

Just did the methods 2019 NHT exam 1 ... literally nothing like I've ever seen before
 Everything required so much effort and thinking, after seeing that I'm not sure I can pull a 25 now.
Has anyone else found the exam difficult. What % am I looking for to get a 25?

Our school did that through full exam conditions - and honestly, it was definetely the hardest Ex 1 I've ever done.....

Personally, I found the normal VCAA ones soooooooo much easier! My teacher said to us not to get too worked up about how well we did on that, as what we are getting is usually about 15% easier. He also said they have a much heavier algebra focus, so idk.

[Ansaki]

i thought this might help you out for NHT exam 1, he also has exam 2.
im not sure if im allowed to post youtube links on here, (if not I'll remove asap)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkg_xsRsCyk&t=1698s

[KiNSKi01]

Wording for q7 part c was so convoluted, I doubt something like that would come up on a non NHT exam

The general trend across all subjects is that the NHT exams are harder so I wouldn't be too worried if you feel like you under performed slightly as you are likely to feel the actual exam easier when it comes around

[jinaede1342]

thanks everyone for the comfort lol! In any which case, what's the point of setting an exam like this when the median for the normal methods VCAA exams is already around 50%. It's like they're trying to set everyone up for failure.

[Lear]

Have gone through NHT 2019 Exam 1 with some of my students. It definitely is on the harder end but there were some questions that were quite accessible. Perhaps more so than a typical exam 1.

ETA: I believe that, on a scale of difficulty, the first 30 marks are actually easier than other years while the final 10 marks were much harder. TBH It could be argued to be a balanced exam due to the easier than normal other marks.

[Massimooo123]

Question 3a was a bit counterintuitive as you wouldn't expect the correct answers to be right at first glance, it looked really messy. Of course, it simplifies later in the question, but the southern hemisphere exams, particularly in the early questions, tend to work with cleaner numbers to assure students they're on the right track (not always though). They also should've split it into ai and aii for the two different solutions, it's weird and clunky otherwise, held me up for a second trying to specify my two separate answers.

Question 6a was worded horribly. It says Jacinta observes "a head on the first two tosses". Does that mean she observes one head on the first two, hence the usage of "a"? Does that mean she observes a head on BOTH of the first two tosses? Can it be one OR two? Really poor phrasing there, my class took it today and it tripped up more than a few of us.

I honestly can't think of a better way to question 7c. It was a kind of cool question actually, but held back by the fact that it's really difficult to express unless they did a previous question which established what they were talking about when they said "express in terms of A(a), for a specific value of a". Another problem with the question is that you could have technically used ANY value of a and then worked the expression around it by calculating the integral from scratch, which doesn't contribute to the difficulty of the exam, but the stupidity of it.

8b had nowhere NEAR enough space to properly "show that". It's pretty clear they just wanted you to write out the expression and go "and that simplifies to the given expression lol", which is obviously ridiculous that students are expected to decipher how much working out VCAA wants you to do without any real specification.

8c was a really good differentiating question, I think. Doubt they'd do something that hard on the southern hemisphere exam, though.

It's definitely the hardest VCAA exam 1 from southern or northern hemisphere imo, so I wouldn't stress over it too much.

[KiNSKi01]

8c was a really good differentiating question, I think. Doubt they'd do something that hard on the southern hemisphere exam, though.

I personally think they kinda stuffed up with 8c and shouldn't have included 'or otherwise' in the question

Could just do 50 x 1/6 and get the answer - At least our teacher awarded that, not sure what examiners would have thought

[Massimooo123]

I personally think they kinda stuffed up with 8c and shouldn't have included 'or otherwise' in the question

Could just do 50 x 1/6 and get the answer - At least our teacher awarded that, not sure what examiners would have thought

50 * 1/6 finds the mean of a binomial distribution, while the question was asking which one comes up most often, i.e. the mode. Maybe the mean is always roughly equal to the mode for a binomial distribution, which makes intuitive sense, but I don't think the proof is trivial. Might be wrong about that, though.

[S_R_K]

Have gone through NHT 2019 Exam 1 with some of my students. It definitely is on the harder end but there were some questions that were quite accessible. Perhaps more so than a typical exam 1.

ETA: I believe that, on a scale of difficulty, the first 30 marks are actually easier than other years while the final 10 marks were much harder. TBH It could be argued to be a balanced exam due to the easier than normal other marks.

I had the opposite impression – 2018 southern hemisphere exam was surprisingly easy for the first two-thirds/three quarters, but had a very steep difficulty curve for the last couple of questions. This 2019 NHT was harder for the first three quarters (with the faux-partial fractions question; the question about solving a square root equation and checking the domain) and the difficulty didn't ramp up too steeply for the last couple. 7c could (and should) have been worded more directly about how applying a certain transformation affects the area of the region. 8c is weird coming after 8b, given that it's more easily answered by ignoring the "hence".

The only genuinely dodgy thing was, as Massimooo pointed out above, the ambiguity in 6a. Unfortunately it is not mentioned in the examiners report (in typical VCAA fashion to not admit any mistakes).