Preparing for the November NSC Finals: A Term 4 Plan

Count Your Days First

Look at your final timetable and count the days from today to your first Maths paper. Write the number down. Four weeks, two weeks and ten days all need the same plan, just squeezed. The phases further down are in order, so when time is short you cut from the early phases and keep the late ones. The order is the part that matters.

Sort Every Topic Into Three Piles

Take your last two tests or your last full paper and sort each topic by what actually happened.

• Green: you got it right, at a sensible speed. Leave it alone until the last week.
• Amber: you got it right but slowly, or you knew the content and still lost marks to a small slip, a missed instruction word or a wrong form of answer.
• Red: you left it blank or got most of it wrong.

Fix the Amber Pile Before the Red One

This feels backwards, because the red topics are the ones that scare you. Start with amber anyway. CAPS puts roughly 55% of the marks in a Mathematics paper at the lower two cognitive levels, knowledge and routine procedures, which means a large share of the marks come from things you can already do. Amber topics are where those marks leak: you know the method and lose the mark on the wording. They convert fastest, and they are the cheapest way to raise your total. Once the amber pile is clean, take the red topics in order of how many marks they usually carry, and stop when the time for that phase runs out. A red topic you half-fix in two days is worth more than three you only glance at.

Use Past Papers in a Fixed Order

Past papers are available free at education.gov.za, and sites such as saexampapers.co.za and testpapers.co.za collect them by year. Use them in this order rather than grabbing whichever is on top.

• Weeks 4 and 3 before the first paper: work through single questions by topic, starting with amber topics. Check each one against the memo straight away.
• Week 2: do one full paper under exam conditions. Each NSC paper is 150 marks in three hours, which is about 1,2 minutes a mark. Time yourself and stop when the time is up.
• Mark that paper with the memo, line by line, the way a marker would. Write down every mark you lost and why: content, arithmetic, or misreading the question.
• Week 1: redo only the questions you lost marks on. Then do a second full paper if there is time.

Why the Full Paper Comes Early

Doing your first timed paper in week two feels too soon, which is exactly why it works. You find out where the time goes while there is still time to change something. Learners who leave the first full paper until the night before find out they run out of time in the one place they can no longer fix it. Jot the clock time in the margin when you finish each question. Afterwards, compare the minutes you spent with the marks on offer. A 3-mark question that took ten minutes is a pacing problem you can fix before the real paper, and it will show up on this page of margin notes long before it shows up in your marks.

Read Every Paper Twice: Once for Maths, Once for Instruction Words

Before you attempt a past paper, underline every instruction word in it: determine, hence, show that, write down, sketch, prove. Then ask what each one needs from you. A 'show that' question, such as the Grade 10 November 2018 Paper 1 exam, question 7.2, which asks you to show that a cash price is R4 779,13, already gives you the answer. The marks are for the method that reaches it, so writing the given figure and nothing else earns nothing. A 'write down' question is the opposite: the answer is usually sitting in the previous part, and a page of working wastes minutes you need later. Twenty minutes spent on this pass is often worth more than an hour of extra content revision.

Treat the Two Papers as Two Separate Jobs

Paper 1 and Paper 2 are written on different days and cover different topics: algebra, sequences, finance, functions, probability and, at Grade 12, calculus in Paper 1; statistics, analytical geometry, trigonometry and Euclidean geometry in Paper 2. Once Paper 1 is done, do not spend the evening picking it apart. Nothing you can learn about Paper 1 now changes your mark, and every hour on it is an hour taken from Paper 2. Do one short review of how the time went, then move on.

The Last Three Days

Do not start new topics now. Use the final three days to lock in what you already know.

• Redo the questions you got wrong in your own practice papers, not fresh ones.
• Read through your list of instruction words one more time, with the form of answer each expects.
• Check your calculator is in degree mode before any trigonometry paper, and bring a spare set of batteries or a spare calculator if you can.
• Pack your instruments, pens and ID the night before so the morning is only about the paper.

If You Are in Grade 10 or 11

The same plan applies to your final exam, with one difference in the tools. Determine This has a bank of practice questions for Grade 11, covering all nine Paper 1 and Paper 2 topics, and the blindspots page lists the question types where your accuracy is below 60% after at least three attempts. That makes it a fast way to build your amber pile. Grade 10 and Grade 12 learners should use past papers and the topic guides in the same way, since the practice questions are Grade 11 only.