It has been a huge challenge for me in maths this year. Throughout the process of facing, overcoming and reflecting on these challenges, I believe I have had a valuable experience that will certainly be a gain for me in the future.

Balancing two IGCSE courses, the Extended Maths course and the Additional Maths course was new to me, and was a major change from what I had been doing during primary and middle school. The Extended Maths course itself being fairly difficult with many areas to cover, I struggled the most when revising for unit tests and the end of year exam. I often got mixed up with what I had studied for Add with that for Extended, ending up studying topics that are irrelevant for the unit tests, and this may have reflected in my grades for some unit tests.

I have noticed this tendency, and therefore for the end of year exam I decided to focus on the Extended Maths topics first, and then once I am confident with everything there, move on to studying the Additional Maths topics. I went back to my unit tests and classwork, went through the revision booklet we got and identified what I had forgotten or what I still did not understand. Then I went through questions on the IGCSE textbook on those topics that I have highlighted. I repeated this process for both the Extended and Additional course, until I was fully confident to take the exam. I also frequently went to the Lunch time math help sessions for specific questions that I could not solve, especially for Add math.

This strategy worked out very well, and I believe it had reflected on my grade for the end of year exam. I was able to gain confidence from this grade I had achieved, and now I feel very positive about managing new topics in Grade 10, preparing for the actual IGCSE exams.

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