Every Higher Maths Student is Unique
As a full time private Maths tutor with ten years’ experience I’ve often been asked how to revise for Higher Maths. Of course, there’s no magic formula for success since every student has different strenghts and weaknesses. However, experience has taught me some effective strategies students can use to maximise their chances. In this short post I’d like to share some ‘best practices’ for how to revise Higher Maths.
How To Revise Higher Maths
Maths is a skill and, like all skills, needs to be practiced. However, it’s also important to spend time trying to understand topics and techniques, rather than just replicating them. The deeper you understand a topic the easier it’ll be to recall the techniques and the more able you’ll be to adapt to the different ways questions can be presented. There are three parts to revising Higher Maths – understanding topics, practising common questions, practicing variations on questions (problem solving).
Understanding Topics
It’s not always easy to get a full understanding of topics before your Maths class moves onto the next thing. But you should make an attempt to understand before you start practicing techniques – otherwise it would be difficult to answer questions which aren’t exactly the same as you’ve seen before. To help understand topics you should read through your class notes asking yourself ‘what is this topic or technique about?’, ‘what is the point in it?’. If your class notes are not easy to follow we have concise HIGHER MATHS COURSE NOTES available.
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, quick questions, course notes and a range of exam prep materials. Ideal to support your classroom work, help with homework and assessments, and prepare for final exams.
Practice Common Questions
Associating techniques to particular question types is one of the biggest challenges for students – but one of the keys to how to revise for higher Maths. It doesn’t matter how well you perform a technique – if it isn’t answering the question you won’t get the marks! If you want to know how to revise Higher Maths, one key will be getting very familiar with common questions. Use our HIGHER EXAM QUESTIONS BY TOPIC to get familiar with common questions – you’ll see that a lot of very similar questions come up each year. You can use our HIGHER MATHS WORKSHEETS to practice these common questions for each topic.
Practice Question Variations
‘I just didn’t know what it was asking me!’ is a common complaint for Higher Maths students. I sympathise with them because it’s not easy to adapt what you know to questions you’ve never seen before. However, the more often you attempt such questions the more you’ll get tuned into how to approach them and the clues to look for. Problem solving questions aren’t easy but they do generally use a standard technique but just in a slightly different way. You should use HIGHER MATHS EXAM PAPERS to look for more elaborate and challenging questions. You can also use HIGHER MATHS EXAM QUESTIONS BY TOPIC to look for variations on standard questions.
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.
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, quick questions, course notes and a range of exam prep materials. Ideal to support your classroom work, help with homework and assessments, and prepare for final exams.
Additional Resources
Further resources for Higher Maths students.
Higher Maths Exam Papers & Solutions
Higher Maths Exam Questions by Topic
Higher Maths Exam Study Materials
Higher Maths Key Skills Playlist