Same as usual. Note that Secret Exam 1 business is no longer secret: VCAA has posted Exam 1, here (link fixed).
UPDATE (09/11/24)
VCAA has now published the exam, here.
UPDATE (06/12/24)
And the marking guide is here.
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Question 2b seems pretty strange and unusual – Some say the answer is 1, some say the answer 4 and some say the answer is 5.
Not sure what VCAA means by finding the “total cost” of a loan for question 8 – It briefly is mentioned in the study design without a definition. I think the intention was to find the total repayments.
Question 4b – Not sure whether they are looking for an increasing trend and irregular fluctuations or increasing trend and a possible outlier.
Someone has posted a copy of the exam on reddit:
Q2b was strange. It should be 1 if we consider the extreme example 1.67, 1.85, 1.85, 1.85, 1.85 which generates a Q1 of 1.85 but still with a min of 1.67, so the boxplot looks the same.
It’ll be interesting to see VCAA’s mark scheme for the explanation for nominal and effective interest rates. I think they’ll look for the following two points:
1. nominal interest rate has a more frequent compounding period than the effective interest rate (fortnightly vs yearly)
2. (and this is, I think, the crucial point) by definition, the interest gained after 1 year should be EQUAL.
I think most of my fellow students will miss the second point 🙁
All in all I think the paper was more challenging than those of other years – VCAA making wordy, convoluted, needlessly tricky and misleading questions as usual, but to a greater extent this year. *sigh*
Thanks, ivy. Can you suggest which questions were wordy and/or convoluted and/or needlessly tricky and/or misleading? I’m not arguing against it whatsoever, haven’t looked at the exam and don’t particularly intend to. But it’d be good to have specific questions in mind.
Question 10 is strange. It’s mathematically sound, but it doesn’t really make any sense to say that the 5th number in a security code is 26, or that the “last number” is 65
Why is part b even there? There’s a CAS command to construct matrix W for part a, so you might as well do the same thing for part b, just with a 1 x 8 matrix rather than a 1 x 5.
I agree, it was the same skill and the same rule.
It did not assess another skill or advance a skill, why even include it?
Question 7. Maybe I am missing something, but it seems more natural to do part c before part b. This is because part b is easily done using a TVM solver on CAS when you know the annual percentage interest rate. Is there a better way to do this question using just the recurrence relation?
I also thought the same thing as I had already calculated it for the previous question. When there is more than say 3 or 4 iterations, I would recommend using TVM solver, so no, there isn’t a better way of doing it.
I actually had a few students question me about that question, they thought it might have been a trick.
VCAA has posted the exam. Link is in the update.