Are you planning on studying at least one maths subject in your first year of Uni? Whether you’re doing it for fun or as a prerequisite for another subject, here are 10 tips to help you ace it.

1. Remember the Fundamentals

Once you get into first year, assumed knowledge is assumed knowledge. Your lecturers are not going to spend time covering any concepts you may have touched on in high school.

Such topics might include:

  • Algebra – manipulation, solving equations, simultaneous equations.
  • Calculus – basics of differentiation and antidifferentiation.
  • Sketching graphs such as circular functions and exponentials.

To make sure that you don’t feel completely lost during your first couple of lectures, it would be worth revising some of the maths you covered in Year 12.

 2. Practise Doing Maths Without a Calculator

In Year 12, you would have likely had the luxury of doing most things in maths with a fancy graphics calculator. Whether it be graphing a complex function or solving an algebraic equation, your calculator had your back. Unfortunately, in Uni, you won’t get to use a machine that is so powerful – you’ll either be stuck with a scientific calculator or nothing at all.

Therefore, you really need to make sure you get comfortable doing maths without a calculator. When you are completing practise questions during the semester, try to avoid using it, and get the hang of checking your answers yourself.

3.  Spend Time Learning How to Use Required Software

If your maths subjects don’t require the use of any type of calculator, you may be encouraged to use a mathematical software to check your answers to some questions. The most popular one used is MATLAB. This is a powerful tool that doubles as a calculator and programming system.

If you know that your subject requires the use of MATLAB (or similar) you really should spend time learning it during the semester. Although these softwares may not be examined in your end of semester exams, it may be compulsory to use for your assignments. If your lecturers/tutors don’t teach you how to use them, there’s plenty of YouTube videos out there that can help you.

4. Stay on Top of Practise Questions

Although you probably won’t be using a textbook for maths like you did in school, your lecturers will provide you with practise questions for each topic. These may be in the form of tutorial sheets, or extra questions for you to try in your own time.

These questions are designed to help you consolidate the learning done in lectures and practise applying the concepts taught yourself. It is vital that you keep doing these problems each week.

Not only will you benefit with the practise, but it will also help you understand any proceeding lectures and assist you with your assignments.

5. Start Exam Questions Early

Compared to school, you won’t have much time to prepare for your end of semester exams. Usually, you will only get one week, which is not enough to revise for 3+ subjects!

Maths is one of those subjects that it is easy to start practise questions early for, as they don’t usually combine topics together in a single question. It will help you ease some stress during SWOTVac!

You can usually access past exam papers on your university’s library website. If not, you can ask your lecturers where you can find some. 

Key Point: In university maths exams, especially in first year, you probably won’t see too many long winded worded problems like you would have in school. They want to see that you have learnt the skills required to solve the problems, more than being able to apply them into a complex scenario.

6. Practise Exams Are SO Important

Uni subjects really don’t change much from year to year. It is very likely that you are learning the same things, in the same order that students may have done in 2010! Therefore, the structure of the exams doesn’t change much at all from year to year. By doing practise exams, you will get accustomed to the difficulty and style of questions that you’ll see on the final one.

Just like you may have done in school, you should also try and complete the practise exams timed, and in exam conditions.

7. Use Other Resources

There are some topics in first year maths that can be quite complicated to grasp (I’m looking right at you linear algebra!). Relying on lectures only to teach you the content may not help you too much, as lecturers don’t usually tend to explain things visually. Therefore, using resources like YouTube to illustrate concepts can be very useful.

If you need further explanation on certain topics, there are plenty of maths textbooks available that will also do the trick.

8. Eliminate the Silly Errors

As you go through your maths subject, you will find that the questions you get are SO LONG. Sometimes, questions will take up to half a page to one whole page of working out! Due to the length of the questions you get, it is very easy to make silly errors as you go. There’s seriously no worse feeling than completing an entire page of working only to realise you forgot a negative sign in the second step.

You should get into the hang of checking your working out as you go, and be really conscious of everything you write down.

9. Maximise Assignment Marks

Your overall grade for the subject is not just dependent on an exam – you will likely have little assignments/quizzes throughout the semester.

These assignments may vary in difficulty, but it is important that you complete them to the best of your ability. Especially if it is a written assignment that isn’t timed – you can really ace it if you try hard enough.

 If you’ve collected enough marks from your assignments, you should hopefully be a bit more relaxed come exam time.

10. Work Collaboratively

Whilst skipping classes may be tempting, especially for maths, they can be more useful than you think. Math classes provides you with an opportunity to discuss content with others, and perhaps you will learn some easier ways to solve the problems.

If you are finding the content easy you should still turn up to class and help other out. This is a great way to develop your own skills and you might still learn a thing or two!

You can even discuss problems with your tutors and get them to check some working out for you – they will make sure you are not overcomplicating things and be able to answer specific questions.  

Hopefully you found these tips helpful and are now feeling ready to conquer your first year maths subjects! Don’t panic if you struggle to keep up or are finding things difficult. Getting a few bad marks is not the end of the world – what’s more important is that you continue to look after yourself. Taking maths subjects in university can be extremely rewarding and useful for a lot of future jobs – so enjoy it!