PSLE Maths Paper

PSLE Mathematics seemed to be much harder as the years go by. There weren’t any calls by parents screaming that the papers were too hard during 1999. For all I remembered, the highest aggregate score that year was only 285 as compared to the usual 288. So the paper could arguably be harder that year? Perhaps it is because parents are getting more protective over their child and when they see their child so distraught over the papers, they call up the MOE board.

In all papers, there will be more tricky questions hidden inside the papers to differentiate pupils who score A and pupils who score A*. If not, Mark moderators will have a hard job to do and 1 point difference may mean thousands of pupils missing out on the A* grade. I admit that for 3 out of the 4 papers I sat for in PSLE, I probably didn’t do well in those tricky questions and ended up not scoring the distinctions.

With that being said, Straits Times today printed out 3 PSLE Maths questions.

Please do go and buy a copy of the STRAITS Times as I find it a hassle to take a photo, resize and put them up on the blog.

Question 1 consist of 3 marks. As I’m pretty rusty with my Maths, I took 6 minutes before I managed to solve it using Simultaneous Equations and solving it with Algebra.

Question 2, I do not know if I’m right or wrong. I took more than 5 minutes thinking through the phrasing of the question. I personally find that for a Maths question, it is important that tricky questions are tricky in the way solutions work out instead of tricky in a way that the question is being phrased. If I was doing this question in an examination condition, I would probably skip it and go back to it at the end of the paper. If the solution is a one step answer, it would mean I’ve understood it correctly eventually. If it isn’t, I wouldn’t fault any kids who failed to solve that question.

Question 3. I personally could only solve it after using guess and check method. Since we know that the water needed to be transfered whould be more than half of what it is carrying, it would not be too tedious. For this question, For 4 marks, it probably is worth it. (My bother managed to come up with a more logical answer though) However, under examination condition, I would probably be too stressed to try the guess and check method and use it only as a last resort.

Thank goodness I took my PSLE in 1999. If I were to take it this year, I might have gotten a B instead!