What should the answer you give in exam look like?

[lucipho]

Hey there,

I am already stressing out over the exam at the end of the year. The thing that school fails to teach me is, how should you approach the exam?

That is, how should you answer a question to get full marks? Show all working out? When drawing a graph, draw the original then the transformed one on the same axis? These are the types of things I am stressing out on, because I don't wan't to lose marks for not showing correct methods etc. or by simply stating the answer...

Any reference pages to topics or tips that relate to this would be much appreciated !

Thanks (:

[Phy124]

It's way too early in the year to be stressing over these things

I think you'll get used to the working out required for certain questions as you progress through the year and when you go through trial exams towards the end of the year.

To gauge what may be required it might be useful to go through past VCAA exam assessor reports and trial exam solutions, but I think it will come naturally to you as you think about the steps required to answer a question and the amount of marks it's worth.

If towards the end of the year you're still struggling with the concept it might be worth asking again, potentially on specific questions, too. All the best

[drake]

1) write as neatly as possible and make sure your answer flows logically (i.e. the examiner can understand how you got from the step before to the current step)

2) show all working out

3) no no no do not show original and transformed graph... just draw the graph that they ask you to sketch! normally, they will give you a cartesian grid and a few lines below the grid, so in those few lines i recommend students to write their working out for the x-intercept, y-intercept, stationary points, asymptotes etc.

from what i've seen, a lot of students do not set out their mathematical solutions properly in SACs and exams... so yeah, no need to stress over it, just try to make it flow logically

[literally lauren]

Most schools prefer to focus on the content for the first 3/4 of the year, then fine-tune your exam approach in the last few weeks, which is the logical approach. So long as things are legible and sensical there's really no need to worry at this stage.
As a general rule of thumb, a question worth, for example,  3 marks will need at least 3 lines of working out, but you'll generally have to work through these to get to an answer anyway.
Once you know the content, demonstrating it properly will be pretty easy, once you get your head around having to write this--> ∴ a lot. Maybe get in the habit of labeling points as coordinates (simply writing an x intercept as 3 is insufficient, has to be (3,0)
Worst case scenario, you're a messy English thinker like me, and you can just rely on a hell of a lot of "flowing logic" arrows.