I'm an A Level Maths teacher at a sixth form college in the south of England, and I make sure to absolutely INSIST that students can do basic computations involving eact trig values with surds and fractions WITHOUT a calculator. This is met with some resistance from some students, because they know they won't ever be asked to do something without a calculator in the real exam. I insist becuase of the reasons you mention, mainly TMUA/MAT etc., but also because my job as a maths teacher is not just to get students to pass exams, but to make them good mathematicians. A good mathematican uses knowledge as their tool, not a calculator.
@@dwcLDN because all "normal" people taking A Level maths should aspire to be good mathematicians. Otherwise why are you taking maths? Just because you need it as a subject to get into uni? You're obviously good at it if you're taking it, so why not aspire to be really good at it and appreciate the underlying beauty within it?
@@TomazzA123don't think memorising algorithms helps tne appreciate the 'beauty' behind proofs nor the 'cleverness' of proofs/axiomatic frameworks; In contrast the same effort to memorise trig values can be used to introduce them to different concept that open their mind- say combinations/permutations, discrete maths or inferential statistics no?
I had no calculator for the first couple of months of my a levels and that has been so valuable since then in so many ways. I got very good at doing long computations with algebra as efficiently as possible, even though it was very frustrating. Add in teachers that make us do trig with exact values non calc and I definitely agree with you based on experience. Non calculator skills are undervalued
11:58 "Are you saying they are abdicating their duty to scrutinize me? Are you saying they haven't the guts to put questions to me? Great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies"
I agree that there should be at least one paper that does not allow the use of a calculator. As an IB AAHL student, I have found that practicing for the Paper 1 that does not allow the use of a calculator has improved my understanding of mathematical theory and made me faster at solving straightforward integration, derivation and computation problems as you showed. This speed also allows me to save time on the questions that permit calculators. I also think not using a calculator on some papers makes us better at thinking critically about the results we obtain from calculators, improving our ability to spot simple calculation errors.
Current year 13 here that sat the MAT 3 days ago. My sixth form college in Wales uses WJECs A-Level math spec, we study all of A-Level maths in year one, before going onto study all of A-Level further maths in year 2. Having sat A-Level maths with its 4 calculator papers, by the time year 13 rolled around my non calculator skills were basically none. Not just me but my entire further math class, A* A-Level math students that couldn’t factorise a basic quadratic without a calculator. When we got to top heavy partial fractions questions we had to have an entire lesson on basic long division you learn in primary school, just to be able to understand the algebraic long division needed to solve those partial fractions questions. Worst part was starting studying for papers like TMUA, ESAT and MAT, half my further math class were aspiring to study at Oxbridge or Imperial college, but it’s incredibly difficult to start getting into the problem solving side of these types of questions, when your basic computational skills are lacking so heavily due to the reliance you build on your calculator. Of course in independent schools this gap can be bridged by all the specialised Oxbridge support they get, but for state school students like myself this bridge becomes a daunting task to try to cross. Support from your videos was really helpful so thank you. I feel like the place where lacking a non calculator paper really affects students, is state school students going onto sit these rigorous papers and therefore a lack of non calculator paper really truly limits Oxbridge progression from state schools. Long paragraph I know but something I feel strongly about!
uni student here(math chem physics for alevels exam in 2024,:honestly I always felt like the calculator was just for stuff like 2.31x4.67 ,simul equation at the end of a modelling question,the quadratic stuff maybe but honestly i never felt over reliant on calculator. for example there features on fx 991 class wiz (which is a standard calculator for all alevel maths student) that allow you solve equations which i never used and the calc can also be used for integration.I think watching tlmaths for pure content kinda drilled it in like this is a checking tool not the answer machine
I totally agree, I'm currently studying for A level maths and so many of the questions, even if you need to show your full working the calcs have so many uses (e.g. solving polynomials) that you can work in reverse, which is far easier and trivialises huge sections of the paper
I’m glad I have a calculator in exams for the purpose of avoiding stupid mistakes, but I will say that it took a long time to build up my mental arithmetic skills and trig values and things whilst preparing for the TMUA.
If a question becomes significantly easier or requires the use of a calculator then it’s probably not a very good question (disregarding Newton-Ralphson etc). I never sat A levels (did Scottish highers and AH) but to me it seems like the questions must be asscheeks for a calculator to make it that much easier.
3:50 most of these require you to know the theory as all the questions require you to show your working and simply writing down the answer wont get you the marks. apart from the sqrt3 sin pi/3 one and the sketch I guess.
Gonna have to hard disagree. There are never theory marks for evaluating a choose function, or solving a quadratic, in integration there is a mark for sight of the function being integrated (but again, all coefficients and powers could be calculated with a calculator), and sometimes there is a mark for sight of intent to evaluate limits, but this can also go straight into a calculator (think evaluating 4^-5/2 for instance). A very small amount of fluency is required at all to get full marks of all of those. I could have been more clear with this point in the video.
Interesting video. I was at secondary school 1978-1985. At the start calculators were not allowed, we used slide rule and tables, but a lot of papers these were not allowed either. Later on calculators were more available, but fairly sure were not allowed in O'Level (old GCSE) and the pure paper A-Level, can't remeber about the mechanics paper. The questions were "better" written with exact values to test knowledge, not just tapping into a calculator. In mechanics they quite often said assume g is 10, so the principle behind the question could be assessed but was not laborious calculations. I think it is very telling that university entrance exams do not use them, shows you can write interesting questions where a calculator is not needed. I agree with you and some of the comments below that they make students reliant on them unnecessarily blunting the mathematical skills and nouse.
yeah i 100% agree with this. Doing the oxford maths entrance exam (which is non calculator) made me realise that a levels are just about memorisation and learning how to do every type of question they can give you. very few people have a conceptual understanding of the topics they're learning.
Agreed; I mean, heck, part of the reason I think my mental arithmetic was so bad post A-levels was due to how heavy my calculator use was. These A-level maths meta commentaries are so valid - on the note of C1, how do you think linear A-level maths stacks up to pre-2017 modular in general ?? A loaded question I realise, but do you think the decrease in flexibility / change of subject content has been a welcome change ?
completely agree tbh i enjoyed revising for tmua and doing tmua style maths so much more than the alevel stuff. its just somewhat disapointing when you get to a question that had potential but its just a calculator job.
I entirely agree with you that one pure paper should be non calc but maybe their reasoning is that students are doing too many marks to sleep arithmetic mistakes which could lower their grade, especially across 3 papers. You'd expect them to feel nervous in their finals so it isn't farfetched that lots of people will make silly mistakes even if they fully understood the question. You may say that it still under prepares them for uni but not all students who are taking a level maths are going for a maths degree. Maybe having the papers be non calc helps students to get marks for what they do understand and go on to do whatever they'd like. It makes sense that they'd account for the majority of people, and not just those taking a maths degree. Nonetheless I still think that one pure paper should be non calc.
I sort of get this reasoning, but the ability to do work under pressure without making mistakes is something that I think is worth assessing, and shouldn't just be written off. For the second point I'll reiterate that with a 50/50 split you'd be preparing everyone else just as well, whilst also preparing the future maths graduates
Hi, just started a degree in Maths and Physics and from this year forward the maths department has started allowing non-graphing calculators (the physics dep. was earlier but thats tangential), not that I think this changes the conclusion as all questions in the maths dep. are s.t. picking up a calculator is a waist of time.
only time i could argue for calcs is them really dumb matrices questions when solving a system of 3 equations where its like 9 marks but none of those marks are for actually computing the inverse. or maybe they could just give marks for computing it but it can be REALLY tedious and can have horrible stupid numbers
Hey, I always assumed they were both calculator papers because in the real world, if you’re doing maths that difficult, you will have a calculator to hand, or perhaps even more sophisticated tools. The fact that universities disallow calculator is separate from a level to me, as they prepare you for separate things. If you’re studying a degree in maths it’s far more likely you need to know the theory, but if you’re only doing a level maths, it’s unlikely you’ll be required to do so. My knowledge is somewhat limited as I’m still young with little experience, but I was wondering why you didn’t address that fact that it’s more realistic to the real world.
I could have been more clear about this, as it's kind of it's own separate point. So "in the real world", there is no difficult maths to be done, once you pass year 8 maths you're already about to start doing, or have already done, more complicated maths than anybody would do in the real world outside perhaps only of their profession (I'll get there in a second). And so any trivial stuff that needs doing can be done on a phone calculator, which is fine. For the small number of professionals who would actually be doing complicated maths, as you say, they'll be given more specialized software and tools to do this, which will require it's own training anyway, and so proficiency on a graphical calculator is made redundant (and would also have been achieved anyway with the exams being 50% and 50% non calc). This point opens up a whole can of worms about what the intent of teaching maths at school even is. If the intent is to prepare for real life, then Foundation GCSE does that, anyone who could demonstrably pass that at the end of year 8 (of which there are many, there are many who could do it at year 6) should they maybe be allowed to drop maths at that point? If the answer is no, then you have this weird grey area of "well we're gonna keep forcing kids to do this until they're 16 (or even older perhaps in the future) so let's just give these people more complicated maths to do until then, even though they've already gone past the point of relevance to real life. The grey area to me kind needs to end if you select this subject for A level, at that point you're miles past real life relevance and are taking it for the subject itself. And so it should act, in my opinion, much like university maths does, and have much the same aims. A ton more tangential open questions get raised here (why are kids forced to do this until 16, why are there things in the Foundation GCSE scheme that have no relevance to real life, why is there a non calc section of Foundation GCSE), but I'll leave it there!
The only argument that I can come up with for this decision is that they simply believe skills that don't involve a calculator aren't particularly useful when it comes to a career. Most people who take A-Level maths take it to be eligible (or as a supplement) for another degree they want to take, which doesn't involve those skills. Additionally, it might be that whoever put forward this idea wanted A-Level maths to remain being the primary qualification that post year 11 students take. I completely disagree with this by the way, but it could be part of the motivation behind this.
@@aadityakalwani what the other person said. You could inverse a matrix using the calc, but if one of the values inside was “z” you’d have to do it by hand.
After doing the mat and having to learn to not use a calculator it has made my maths so much better
The only pro of a calculator exam is to give legends a chance to assert dominance by still not using the calculator
cringe
almost the point of satire
@@JO06 fr
I'm an A Level Maths teacher at a sixth form college in the south of England, and I make sure to absolutely INSIST that students can do basic computations involving eact trig values with surds and fractions WITHOUT a calculator. This is met with some resistance from some students, because they know they won't ever be asked to do something without a calculator in the real exam. I insist becuase of the reasons you mention, mainly TMUA/MAT etc., but also because my job as a maths teacher is not just to get students to pass exams, but to make them good mathematicians. A good mathematican uses knowledge as their tool, not a calculator.
would you recommend the job?
So Why would us "normal" people doing A Level maths that arent doing an entrace exam for some prestigous uni have to do a whole non calculator paper
@@Mustafa_Shahzad it's the best job I've ever had. Albeit the only job I've ever had, but I would still recommend it without a doubt
@@dwcLDN because all "normal" people taking A Level maths should aspire to be good mathematicians. Otherwise why are you taking maths? Just because you need it as a subject to get into uni? You're obviously good at it if you're taking it, so why not aspire to be really good at it and appreciate the underlying beauty within it?
@@TomazzA123don't think memorising algorithms helps tne appreciate the 'beauty' behind proofs nor the 'cleverness' of proofs/axiomatic frameworks; In contrast the same effort to memorise trig values can be used to introduce them to different concept that open their mind- say combinations/permutations, discrete maths or inferential statistics no?
The GOAT is back, what a good birthday present to me. Been a long 2 weeks, glad you’re back.
wait ur born on nov 2?
yeah, how come?
@@Paige-Megs im born nov 2 aswell lol
@ best birthday in my unbiased opinion, happy birthday!!
@@Paige-Megs yeah I can definately agree on that
I had no calculator for the first couple of months of my a levels and that has been so valuable since then in so many ways. I got very good at doing long computations with algebra as efficiently as possible, even though it was very frustrating.
Add in teachers that make us do trig with exact values non calc and I definitely agree with you based on experience.
Non calculator skills are undervalued
11:58 "Are you saying they are abdicating their duty to scrutinize me? Are you saying they haven't the guts to put questions to me? Great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies"
I agree that there should be at least one paper that does not allow the use of a calculator. As an IB AAHL student, I have found that practicing for the Paper 1 that does not allow the use of a calculator has improved my understanding of mathematical theory and made me faster at solving straightforward integration, derivation and computation problems as you showed. This speed also allows me to save time on the questions that permit calculators. I also think not using a calculator on some papers makes us better at thinking critically about the results we obtain from calculators, improving our ability to spot simple calculation errors.
This last sentence is also a good point that I missed
Current year 13 here that sat the MAT 3 days ago. My sixth form college in Wales uses WJECs A-Level math spec, we study all of A-Level maths in year one, before going onto study all of A-Level further maths in year 2. Having sat A-Level maths with its 4 calculator papers, by the time year 13 rolled around my non calculator skills were basically none. Not just me but my entire further math class, A* A-Level math students that couldn’t factorise a basic quadratic without a calculator. When we got to top heavy partial fractions questions we had to have an entire lesson on basic long division you learn in primary school, just to be able to understand the algebraic long division needed to solve those partial fractions questions. Worst part was starting studying for papers like TMUA, ESAT and MAT, half my further math class were aspiring to study at Oxbridge or Imperial college, but it’s incredibly difficult to start getting into the problem solving side of these types of questions, when your basic computational skills are lacking so heavily due to the reliance you build on your calculator. Of course in independent schools this gap can be bridged by all the specialised Oxbridge support they get, but for state school students like myself this bridge becomes a daunting task to try to cross. Support from your videos was really helpful so thank you. I feel like the place where lacking a non calculator paper really affects students, is state school students going onto sit these rigorous papers and therefore a lack of non calculator paper really truly limits Oxbridge progression from state schools. Long paragraph I know but something I feel strongly about!
Quite literally a skill issue if you can't factorise quadratics without a calculator lol.
Mate thats on you if u use a calculator on everything. Get ur brain up
@@s6lehThat’s the point lol, it’s an issue because the skill isn’t being used because we are taught to use calculators instead.
uni student here(math chem physics for alevels exam in 2024,:honestly I always felt like the calculator was just for stuff like 2.31x4.67 ,simul equation at the end of a modelling question,the quadratic stuff maybe but honestly i never felt over reliant on calculator. for example there features on fx 991 class wiz (which is a standard calculator for all alevel maths student) that allow you solve equations which i never used and the calc can also be used for integration.I think watching tlmaths for pure content kinda drilled it in like this is a checking tool not the answer machine
also how would u not know algebraic division its a year 1 topic
my invigilator for the tmua sounded just like drew for some reason it kind of helped me lock in
I totally agree, I'm currently studying for A level maths and so many of the questions, even if you need to show your full working the calcs have so many uses (e.g. solving polynomials) that you can work in reverse, which is far easier and trivialises huge sections of the paper
I’m glad I have a calculator in exams for the purpose of avoiding stupid mistakes, but I will say that it took a long time to build up my mental arithmetic skills and trig values and things whilst preparing for the TMUA.
If a question becomes significantly easier or requires the use of a calculator then it’s probably not a very good question (disregarding Newton-Ralphson etc). I never sat A levels (did Scottish highers and AH) but to me it seems like the questions must be asscheeks for a calculator to make it that much easier.
3:50 most of these require you to know the theory as all the questions require you to show your working and simply writing down the answer wont get you the marks. apart from the sqrt3 sin pi/3 one and the sketch I guess.
Gonna have to hard disagree. There are never theory marks for evaluating a choose function, or solving a quadratic, in integration there is a mark for sight of the function being integrated (but again, all coefficients and powers could be calculated with a calculator), and sometimes there is a mark for sight of intent to evaluate limits, but this can also go straight into a calculator (think evaluating 4^-5/2 for instance). A very small amount of fluency is required at all to get full marks of all of those. I could have been more clear with this point in the video.
Interesting video. I was at secondary school 1978-1985. At the start calculators were not allowed, we used slide rule and tables, but a lot of papers these were not allowed either. Later on calculators were more available, but fairly sure were not allowed in O'Level (old GCSE) and the pure paper A-Level, can't remeber about the mechanics paper. The questions were "better" written with exact values to test knowledge, not just tapping into a calculator. In mechanics they quite often said assume g is 10, so the principle behind the question could be assessed but was not laborious calculations. I think it is very telling that university entrance exams do not use them, shows you can write interesting questions where a calculator is not needed. I agree with you and some of the comments below that they make students reliant on them unnecessarily blunting the mathematical skills and nouse.
This is why I believe the advanced extension award papers are great.
yeah i 100% agree with this. Doing the oxford maths entrance exam (which is non calculator) made me realise that a levels are just about memorisation and learning how to do every type of question they can give you. very few people have a conceptual understanding of the topics they're learning.
ye some of us arent doing entrance exams for oxford or cambridge mate
Agreed; I mean, heck, part of the reason I think my mental arithmetic was so bad post A-levels was due to how heavy my calculator use was. These A-level maths meta commentaries are so valid - on the note of C1, how do you think linear A-level maths stacks up to pre-2017 modular in general ?? A loaded question I realise, but do you think the decrease in flexibility / change of subject content has been a welcome change ?
i think we need a non calculator paper. theres got to be a reason why the top universities require non calc in their entrance exam?
completely agree tbh i enjoyed revising for tmua and doing tmua style maths so much more than the alevel stuff. its just somewhat disapointing when you get to a question that had potential but its just a calculator job.
Hi, you talk about your old channel? Do you have a link. Great work with the paper walk throughs
I entirely agree with you that one pure paper should be non calc but maybe their reasoning is that students are doing too many marks to sleep arithmetic mistakes which could lower their grade, especially across 3 papers. You'd expect them to feel nervous in their finals so it isn't farfetched that lots of people will make silly mistakes even if they fully understood the question. You may say that it still under prepares them for uni but not all students who are taking a level maths are going for a maths degree. Maybe having the papers be non calc helps students to get marks for what they do understand and go on to do whatever they'd like. It makes sense that they'd account for the majority of people, and not just those taking a maths degree. Nonetheless I still think that one pure paper should be non calc.
I sort of get this reasoning, but the ability to do work under pressure without making mistakes is something that I think is worth assessing, and shouldn't just be written off.
For the second point I'll reiterate that with a 50/50 split you'd be preparing everyone else just as well, whilst also preparing the future maths graduates
@rtwodrew2 Yeah to be fair
2:50 +c
Hi, just started a degree in Maths and Physics and from this year forward the maths department has started allowing non-graphing calculators (the physics dep. was earlier but thats tangential), not that I think this changes the conclusion as all questions in the maths dep. are s.t. picking up a calculator is a waist of time.
only time i could argue for calcs is them really dumb matrices questions when solving a system of 3 equations where its like 9 marks but none of those marks are for actually computing the inverse. or maybe they could just give marks for computing it but it can be REALLY tedious and can have horrible stupid numbers
The act that you changed the thumbnail :0
Hey, I always assumed they were both calculator papers because in the real world, if you’re doing maths that difficult, you will have a calculator to hand, or perhaps even more sophisticated tools. The fact that universities disallow calculator is separate from a level to me, as they prepare you for separate things. If you’re studying a degree in maths it’s far more likely you need to know the theory, but if you’re only doing a level maths, it’s unlikely you’ll be required to do so. My knowledge is somewhat limited as I’m still young with little experience, but I was wondering why you didn’t address that fact that it’s more realistic to the real world.
I could have been more clear about this, as it's kind of it's own separate point. So "in the real world", there is no difficult maths to be done, once you pass year 8 maths you're already about to start doing, or have already done, more complicated maths than anybody would do in the real world outside perhaps only of their profession (I'll get there in a second). And so any trivial stuff that needs doing can be done on a phone calculator, which is fine. For the small number of professionals who would actually be doing complicated maths, as you say, they'll be given more specialized software and tools to do this, which will require it's own training anyway, and so proficiency on a graphical calculator is made redundant (and would also have been achieved anyway with the exams being 50% and 50% non calc).
This point opens up a whole can of worms about what the intent of teaching maths at school even is. If the intent is to prepare for real life, then Foundation GCSE does that, anyone who could demonstrably pass that at the end of year 8 (of which there are many, there are many who could do it at year 6) should they maybe be allowed to drop maths at that point? If the answer is no, then you have this weird grey area of "well we're gonna keep forcing kids to do this until they're 16 (or even older perhaps in the future) so let's just give these people more complicated maths to do until then, even though they've already gone past the point of relevance to real life. The grey area to me kind needs to end if you select this subject for A level, at that point you're miles past real life relevance and are taking it for the subject itself. And so it should act, in my opinion, much like university maths does, and have much the same aims.
A ton more tangential open questions get raised here (why are kids forced to do this until 16, why are there things in the Foundation GCSE scheme that have no relevance to real life, why is there a non calc section of Foundation GCSE), but I'll leave it there!
@@rtwodrew2Thankyou for answering my question, that does make a fair bit of sense
The only argument that I can come up with for this decision is that they simply believe skills that don't involve a calculator aren't particularly useful when it comes to a career. Most people who take A-Level maths take it to be eligible (or as a supplement) for another degree they want to take, which doesn't involve those skills. Additionally, it might be that whoever put forward this idea wanted A-Level maths to remain being the primary qualification that post year 11 students take. I completely disagree with this by the way, but it could be part of the motivation behind this.
They should allow normal calculators but not graphing ones
What's your opinion on AQA A level maths and further maths, compared to edexcel?
exams are better. resources are jarring.
As an Asian I can confirm our family disown us, if we even touch a calculator.
cringe
@dwcLDN yeah, that's why I put it there.
yes
yes you do
Just put parameters in questions.
what do you mean?
@@aadityakalwani Letters like x, y, z that represents numbers
@@aadityakalwani what the other person said.
You could inverse a matrix using the calc, but if one of the values inside was “z” you’d have to do it by hand.
common R2Drew2 W
Picking up your calculator for almost all questions is annoying.