Applied Maths?

peterpoker

I am not very good at laungages so was thinkin of takin up apllied maths to get extra points.
im not doing physics but am very good at regular maths.
Any other thoughts?
Any1 else do it outside school?

Davidius

If you're good at maths, you'll usually do well enough at applied maths. It's a short enough course and if you were really pushed you could do it on your own, though it's probably not recommended in most cases.

You don't really need to have done Physics to do it. If anything I'd say it's more that Physics becomes easier if you do Applied Maths, not so much the other way around.

I think you should definitely consider it, it's not really all that much work either.

jumpguy

Sorry this post isn't too detailed, it's late!

I tried applied maths, and it was far more time consuming than I expected. I was trying to do it outside school, completely alone. Long story short, I ended up cutting my loses and dropping it. It's a leaving cert subject at the end of the day, and no LC subject is gonna be a walk in the park. Sure, the course is short, but that means you need excellent coverage. Also, in opposition to Davidius' post (sorry :P), there is a good bit of work involved to get the high grade (B1+ like), unless you're very, very good at maths.

For me, it just didn't seem like a subject I could easily get an A1 in. And I didn't really fancy doing an extra subject for an extra C1.

Just my experience with it, not trying to throw you off, but it's not all roses!

Conor108

Im in 6th year now and I really should never have taken it up. At this stage I've invested too much time/work though

**Timbuk2**

I really like it, but I'm doing it outside of school with a teacher. I don't think it is essential to do physics to do Applied Maths - we learned a lot of the mechanics stuff in app maths before we did it in physics, and I was fine. However there is a large crossover, and at least 5 chapters of the physics book are made quite easy as they are simplified versions of what is done in Applied Maths.

The course may be short but it isn't easy. The exam paper questions are very tricky and you need to do lots of exam papers to be able to get full marks in the questions (I'm sure most Applied Maths students will agree with me that the papers look very daunting at first!)

GeeNorm

I did it over 10 years ago but for what it is worth, I did maths (A1) and applied maths (B2) but not physics.

This may sound obvious but it can help explain the attraction of the subject - The maths in 'maths' is simple so the questions are difficult. The maths in 'applied maths' is difficult so the questions are easy.
Because the questions are easy, it is possible to simply learn previous years' examples (which can't change that much to remain easy) and get by.