How to get a 9 on your maths GCSE

This year, I sat my maths GCSE, and wow was it difficult. Not only were the grade boundaries higher than the last few years, but us Edexcel students doing the higher paper got hit with this impossible question. Despite this, I was still able to achieve a grade 9. Here’s how I did it! I hope you can learn from my successes and mistakes and achieve a 9 as well 🙂

This guide has some slightly GCSE-specific sections, but it’ll still help you even if you’re not a GCSE student. If you’re confused about what GCSEs are, check out this guide :).

Don’t neglect mocks

The biggest mistake I made was not studying for mocks. I only did 3 practice papers, and I mainly relied on my natural maths abilities to help me coast through with a good grade. Don’t make the same mistake! Treat your mocks with the same importance as your actual GCSE exams. You should do this because your mocks are essentially a simulation of the actual GCSE, and this is the perfect time to figure out how much studying you need to do to achieve a 9.

As well as this, your mocks are the ideal situation for you to figure out what you struggle with before the actual GCSE. For example, if you didn’t finish all the questions on time, then you should work on your speed. If you got high scores on practice papers but you flunked the mock, then you should work on your exam stress.

Study year-round

Another mistake I made was not studying throughout the entire year. While I did a few practice questions here and there, for the most part, I only started studying in March (my first exam was in May). To avoid cramming, you should try to spread out your revision over the course of year 10 & 11, rather than the months leading up to your exams.

The only reason it worked out fine for me was because maths was the only GCSE I was doing that year – if you’re sitting 7-10 GCSEs in one year, then you can’t afford to study at the last minute. Try make a study schedule so that you’ll be confident in your abilities by the time GCSE exams start.

Past + practice papers

By my last exam, I had done close to 60 practice papers in total. Practice papers are the best things you can do, especially past papers. This is because they give you an insight into how exam questions are structured. After you do a few papers, you’ll start to see patterns in the types of questions that you’ll be asked. The more papers you do, the better prepared you’ll be, since you’ll have answered virtually every question that could come up.

The order I’d recommend you do past papers in is this: start with doing each of the June past papers from 2017 onwards. Once you’ve done that, analyse your mistakes carefully (I’ll explain this in the next section), and start working on topic-specific questions. When you’re confident with your abilities, do the November papers, since they tend to be harder. If you’re aiming for a 9, then do grade 9 papers and the hardest GCSE questions. After this, you should be ready. However, if you want more papers, do predicted papers from various sources. You can also do papers before 2017 if you run out of papers to do. I’ll link the websites I used for practice papers in the resources section 🙂

Analyse your mistakes

After you do each paper, make sure to make a note of your mistakes. In an Excel spreadsheet, note the paper name, question number, topic, and the type of mistake you made. Make sure you fully understand how to do each question. If you start to notice that you make a lot of mistakes from one particular topic, then do practice questions from only that topic. I also made a PowerPoint with screenshots of the questions that I missed. I then printed it out and re-tried all of them before the exam.

Resources

Here are the resources I used! They include past, practice, and predicted papers, as well as some websites to help you understand topics better.