Maths Paper 2 (HL) with Jason

After sitting Maths Paper 1 and 2, I finally get to say goodbye to calculations and say hello to my favourite season: summer! It was a fairly nice paper that wasn’t too complex, unlike Paper 1, although at times I felt like I was reading an English exam - but that’s all part of Paper 2 itself.

As usual, Paper 2 covered trigonometry, statistics and probability, coordinate geometry (of the line and circle), and geometry. The SEC gave us a nice question at the start with a stem-and-leaf graph, although what caught me off guard was how short the entire exam felt - I was overthinking whether I had even sat the right paper.

Paper 2 was definitely simpler than Paper 1, in my opinion. I felt like we were given the chance to truly show our mathematical skills and become mathematicians. Constructions appeared on the paper this year, which was interesting, as we would usually be asked to construct orthocentres, centroids, or tangents, but instead we constructed a simple axially symmetric triangle!

We were also given area and volume questions, which was amazing because I love finding the heights of cones and cuboids. Inferential statistics made an appearance, as always, and I really enjoyed the nice, short statistics questions. They didn’t ask us for much, as some of the answers were already provided, which was lovely.

The line short questions were beautiful and truly tested our knowledge of coordinate geometry. I’m going to be honest: midway through the exam, I forgot what a sine graph looked like. Proofs are also my favourite because they require us to manipulate the Formulae and Tables booklet, and that’s what maths is all about!

The long questions were pretty fair, with plenty of trigonometry, but I was waiting to find the value of x from a function and had to use a CAST diagram. I was quite shocked when I realised we didn’t have to find a correlation coefficient, despite seeing it in past papers - I wanted to show off my calculator skills! Overall, the paper was lovely and definitely better than Paper 1. I look forward to finishing my remaining exams and not having to touch another textbook again!