Up and Down

Last week I started working though M208's specimen paper and I found it quite hard going. I can't face sitting down to 3 hours of work at one go, so I have been doing a question at a time and timing myself. It was a bit of an eye opener. The first 12 questions (part 1) carry 70 percent of the marks and ideally I would like to spend 10 mins each on these questions leaving an hour for the longer part 2 questions. However my timings varied from 7 mins up to 23 mins and one question I had to abandon because I got in a stew over it. The need for speed also caused some terrible errors. I then went on to do questions 13 and 14 and came a cropper in both as I couldn't complete them and was lost as to what to do.

So a bit of a dip in my confidence followed! I had a rethink about my approach and decided that accuracy and "more haste less speed" was required. So this week I have begun the part 1 questions from the 2007 paper and things have improved a bit. Timings are much the same but the accuracy has got better and I think this is the best I can hope for. If I can get through all of the part 1 questions and have a good stab at one part 2 question then I will be happy. So confidence has gone up a bit again.

The problem with trying to speed up is that once you start to make mistakes, you start to doubt yourself and what you are doing. As panic starts to creep in, so your mind tends to go blank and it all becomes a muddle. My attitude then will be one step at a time and to stay focused and hope that I can keep this up for 3 hours, much like I did for MS221.