Hi. I'm currently doing year 11 Adv. Maths, and was wondering when or if it would be too late to drop down to standard. My marks vary a lot, I got 60% in my first assessment task (exam, rank 7/20ish) but 100% in my second (take home task) so I'm conflicted about whether or not to drop. I've always done pretty horribly in exams despite thinking I understand the stuff well, and am slightly struggling at the moment with the exercises. Not sure if this is a "get a tutor" situation or a "drop" situation (or both), so I want to see how I do in the Adv. prelims but not sure if it's too late to drop to standard for year 12. If you dropped/have seen other people drop, what would you recommend?
When/is it too late to drop to Standard Maths?
Joseph41 added the NSW Year 11 Mathematics Advanced NSW Year 11 Mathematics Standard tags .
7 days later
Hey! I was in pretty much the exact same situation last year. I also got 100% on my take home assessment but 60-70% on everything else, which was quite a difference from my other subjects. Maths has never been my passion so I didn't really have the drive to try harder, do all the homework etc. and at the beginning of term 4 of year 11 I dropped to standard. It's honestly been so much better this year, I've gone from middle of my adv maths class to rank 1 across both standard 2 classes at my school! Dropping was a very tricky decision but I was also picking up ext 2 english and the workload would've been way too much.
I would say talk to a trusted maths teacher who knows your strengths – I went to my year 9/10 teacher and he said dropping to standard would probably benefit my atar, even though it's not weighted as well, because the work is just so much easier. It's really a big gap between standard and advanced, mainly stuff you would've already seen in year 9 and 10. Of course it's absolutely possible to still do really well in advanced with lots of hard work (and those marks aren't at all bad!), but for me personally dropping to standard alleviated so much stress and I'm really glad I did it. I would stick out your prelims first though and see where you're at because otherwise you'd have to do even more revision. Hope this helps and good luck! 