She said, "when I was six years old, I was on the playground at school and some of us in a group were singing songs we liked. I started to sing my favorite song when one of the older kids laughed at me and said I couldn't sing and that I had a terrible voice. They said I was tone deaf. I didn't know what that meant and I haven't been able to sing since."^[1]

• It started from 3(iv) Find sum(n/(n+1)!, n, 1, N) in terms of N. Blanked out after I thought we weren't thought the formula for n factorial, and moved on. Somehow it totally slipped past me to use the method of difference even though I got to the stage where I expressed the sum as a difference
• Differential equation was a disaster. I forgot all my indices. At first I was like dx/dt = -kx^(2/3) => x^(3/2)dx/dt = -k. And then I did quite a bit of working before somehow realising that I got my indices completely wrong, and then changed my working. Just as I thought I got the correct answer, I used my equation to do 6(ii) and got t = 10, which was obviously wrong. Decided not to pore through the working, and instead moved on.
• Question 7 (the graph question occupying one page by itself) was horrendous. It could have been that we were taught to do it and I completely missed it, or I completely didn't see how to apply it, or we were not taught at all.
  
• The fatigue set in halfway during the paper, which made it quite difficult to think properly.
• 9(iii): It didn't occur to me that I could use this to check 9(i)
• Skipped Question 10(ii).
• Statistics was rather okay, barring careless mistakes. With about 20 minutes left I went back to select one question that I had skipped to work on. Since I'm most confident with statistics, I went to work on 10(ii), the probability question, and hence spent 20 minutes of my exam time getting exactly 0 marks.
• This is why. 10(ii): Find the probability that 2 female athletes are chosen given that at least one volleyball player is chosen. I read 2 female athletes as at least 2 female athletes, and in fact I clearly remember being told by my tutor that in mathematics, there is 1 of something means there is at least 1 of something. That's why, in fact, for Functions, we're supposed to write cuts the curve at one and only one point. My reading made the question very hard for me, until I realised that the question states at least one volleyball player is chosen, which implied that they would have stated at least 2 female athletes if they had meant at least. But this was already when I was on 10(iii) - which depended on 10(ii), so I had to go back and change my working, or else I couldn't proceed. But I wasn't quite in the mood to spend more time here, so I moved to -
• The summation question and realised 1 minute before time was called to use the method of difference. I scurried to write down "method of difference" before trying to list down the terms. Alas, time was called before I could even start.

1. Sleep well. Sounds laughable now that I'm saying it, but what time did I sleep? 11.56 pm. What time did I have to wake up? 5.45 am. Total sleep? 6 hours. How to survive a three-hour long paper in the morning when I'll be doing Mathematics throughout? This probably caused the fatigue and contributed to a few of the screw-ups listed above. In fact, the sleep times over the past week:
   
   16th: 2.19 am - 6.36 am;
   17th: 2.06 am - 6.02 am;
   18th: 2.00 am - 2.01 pm;
   19th: 5.05 am - 10.10 am;
   20th: 3.14 am - 8.49 am;
   21st: 3.30 am - 11.50 am;
   22nd: 2.24 am - 9.30 am;
   23rd: 11.56 pm - 5.45 am.
   
   As is rather obvious, today was an abrupt change from my routine. I had better plan my sleep better next time.
2. Clarifications. "2 female athletes" - I should have asked for clarification instead of spending so much time on an assumption that I wasn't certain of.
3. Long questions. After long questions, check to see how the parts are related and how one part can be used to check another/how information from an earlier part can be used to cut short calculations.

• When question asks for graphs labelled with equations of asymptotes, remember to write x = 0 and/or y = 0 even if the asymptotes coincide with the axes

• 650–1000 characters
• 60% language, 40% content, hence language is more important than content
• Mark allocation
• Language [24/40]
• Highest band:
• Confident use of complex sentence patterns
• Generally accurate, extensive vocabulary
• Good sense of idiom [21–24]
• Critical bands:
• Tendency to be simple, clumsy or laboured [10–15]
• Inappropriate use of idiom [10–15]
• Consistently simple or pedestrian sentence patterns with persistent errors [5–9]
• Content [16/40]
• Highest band:
• Detailed, clearly relevant and well illustrated
  
• Coherently argued and structured [14–16]
• Critical bands:
• More limited capacity to argue [7–10]
• Major misunderstanding of question [3–6]