How To Pass Higher Maths

Every Student is Different

As a full time private Maths tutor with ten years’ experience you can imagine I’ve worked with a range of students and learner types. So I know very well there’s no magic formula for passing Higher Maths. However, that experience has also taught me the things students can do to maximise their chances and the most common pitfalls. Higher Maths is challenging but in this short article I’d like to share some ‘best practices’ for how to pass Higher Maths.

Higher Maths is a Course in Functions

The Higher Maths course contains a range of topics and students will have to become familiar with many techniques. But essentially Higher Maths is a course in Mathematical functions. So, if you want to know how to pass Higher Maths a good starting point is to understand WHAT FUNCTIONS ARE and to be able to give examples of different TYPES OF FUNCTION. A lot of students never get to trips with these fundamental concepts which makes the rest of the course more demanding. One feature of functions that students should strive to understand is their GRAPHS. Graphs allow us to visualise functions and learn their key properties. More about graphs of functions below.

Become A Calculus Ninja!

Calculus is the biggest topic in Higher Maths accounting for around 30% of the marks on the final exam. Calculus is the collective term for the Differentiation and Integration topics. These topics are not easy and contain a lot of different techniques. However, getting some key skills down will make these topics far more manageable and can turn them into great opportunities to pick up marks on the final exam. This is especially true since many of the applications of derivatives and integrals are spin-offs from a handful of key skills. Students should master (yes, master!) the POWER RULE FOR DIFFERENTIATION and the POWER RULE FOR INTEGRATION before moving on to applications such as Stationary Points, Optimization, Rates of Change, Areas Under a Curve and Differential Equations. Check your skills on these topics with our FREE PDF WORKSHEETS. If you’re having trouble with these check out my DIFFERENTIATION & INTEGRATION video playlist.

Need More Help with Higher Maths?

We have the solution with our Higher Maths Online Course. Featuring 85 step by step instructional videos, more than 500 exam relevant practice questions with full solutions and comprehensive course notes. Ideal to support your classroom work, help with homework or tests, and prepare for final exams. Learn more and start your course access HERE.

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Understanding is Crucial

Many students think of Maths as a list of techniques to memorise, with each technique consisting of a series of steps. Added together that’s a LOT of steps to memorise. But if a student can instead try to ‘understand’ topics then it takes pressure off of just memorising. If you understand a topic then the techniques and steps make sense and are therefore easier to recall. Check out my HIGHER MATHS KEY TECHNIQUES video playlist to better understand some of the common topics. For a concise guide to each topic in the course check out my HIGHER MATHS COURSE NOTES.

Practice Common Questions

One of the biggest challenges that Higher Maths students face is associating techniques to particular question types. It doesn’t matter how competent you are with a technique – if it isn’t answering the question you won’t get the marks! Students often remark that the questions that come up on assessments are ones they’ve never seen before. Of course this is rarely true, they just haven’t recognized the question type. If you want to know how to pass Higher Maths, one key will be getting very familiar with common questions. If you look at past HIGHER MATHS EXAM PAPERS – and, in particular, PAST EXAM QUESTIONS BY TOPIC – you see that essentially the same questions come up every year but in a slightly different form. But that said questions are never going to be identical from year to year so it’s also important to be prepared for, and practice, variations. Click to watch VIDEO SOLUTIONS to past exam papers.

Get To Grips with Graphs

There are several techniques in Higher Maths related to graphs. But understanding graphs and their properties can also hugely help you understand functions – and functions are largely what the Higher Maths course is about. Students should start by understanding GRAPHS OF FUNCTIONS before moving onto learning about Graphs of POLYNOMIAL FUNCTIONS and Graphs of TRIGONOMETRIC FUNCTIONS. A great tool that you can use to better understand graphs is the DESMOS graphing calculator. It’s easy to use and allows you to quickly visualise the graph of any function. It’s worth using for any question which contains a function regardless of whether it’s an actual graph question or not.