Confused as to whether to drop to General (1 Viewer)

[esu_chan]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if I could get some advice about dropping or not.

The careers adviser at my school approached me the other day and suggested maybe I should drop to General so that it would help my ATAR. I'm planning to do an animation degree once I finish school, and the required subjects for the particular course I'm looking at (B Design in Animation, UTS) don't include 2U Math. I'm not doing terribly well in the subject (Failed my yearly, but managed to pass my last topic test), however part of it may be because I didn't apply myself very well in Preliminary. Also, I've never really been good at Math.

My other subjects are Advanced English, Ancient History, Visual Arts, Senior Science and Continuers French (Open High School).

Any suggestions would be really helpful

 

[Carrotsticks]

There is a very big difference between 2U and General.

I know for sure that in the field of Animation, there is a huge amount of Mathematics including Bezier Curves and Polygon Modelling, but I'm not quite sure if that's involved in the actual degree itself.

If you literally failed (not Asian failed) the Yearly and just passed the last topic test, then perhaps 2U isn't suited for you. Things get a whole lot harder in Year 12 2U, especially when it comes to Maxima/Minima problems etc.

 

[effylove]

Until year 12 maths I was getting averages of 30% in maths due to perpetual laziness
My teachers urged me to do general for year 12

In Year 12 I completed 2U, beating most 3Uers in internal 2U tests because I put effort into the subject

you can do it.

however I'm not going to sugar coat it, I did A LOT of work for that subject because I had to learn all basics of maths in my own time that I had ignored from year 9-11 on top of learning and working through the new stuff.

2U really isn't overly difficult, just know that you'll need to spend time on it to improve (especially if you're not naturally mathematically inclined)

 

[1xcv3we]

Hi Esu_chan,

I had to face a similar decision to you back when I was doing my HSC. If you're doing poorly in Mathematics then I suggest you either take the advice given to you above or you can take your career advisor's advice and drop down to General. I did general maths when 2U was proving to be too much for me and that helped with my UAI. You will need to aim for a band 6 though in general if you do not want the scaling to affect you too much, just make sure you give the subject a decent amount of attention and do not look at anything as being too simple and easy. I made the mistake of overlooking a few things and that cost me at times 10 marks or more in exams. General maths is easy if you're into financial mathematics and mostly applied problems.

But as Carrotsticks was saying, animation does have higher level mathematics in it. I am doing Numerical Methods this semester at uni and I know that interpolation and splines do play a role in animation when it comes to smoothing out curves. So eventually you will be confronted again with mathematics that is challenging, but it is possible to get up to scratch with the mathematics that will be relevant to what you are doing, you will probably just have a lot of gaps in your knowledge like me. It is still possible to enter uni and get Distinctions and High Distinctions in mathematics based subjects, you will just need to put a lot of work and time into the 1st year subjects (as they are usually the most broad in what they cover. They usually recap content from the 2U, 3U and 4U courses plus extras at Uni level).

Personally, I have found that learning the mathematics in Uni as opposed to High school was much more tollerable. Although it may seem intimidating, you'd be surprised at how well you can be capable of learning mathematics even when you are moving at a pace that is 4x faster than High School.

Hope this helps in some way.

Cheers

 

[esu_chan]

Thanks so much for the help, guys!

I dropped to General last week.