Just thought the is ask everyone how they are finding 4u because i’m honestly thinking of dropping at this point. I feel i find the subject too hard and takes up to much of my time when i could probably focus my time on other things. Idk though, it’s a good subject with cracked scaling but tbh i don’t know if it’s worth it for me. Yeah well i cooked my safety net in term 4 for advanced that’s a depressing factor for me weighing on my decision whether to keep or drop . Idk am i better off staying with 4u and getting an e3 which would give me 95+ atar contribution ? Idk, just been feeling rlly stressed lately and don’t really know what to do. Thing is i don’t even really need a high atar, I feel i am putting to much pressure on myself for something that doesn’t even really matter in the long run. I’m not trying to get direct entry into medicine or anything (although that would be nice) but I just want a good atar to make me feel good and that my schooling has been worth it.
Just thought i’d also include that I find 3 unit pretty easy, same as advanced. Idk, i’m pretty good at math but some of the 4unit questions annoy me and make me sorta stressed when there isn’t really a set in stone method to working them out. It’s mainly just conceptual you know? You just need to know your math really well tbh to do well in 4u.
just stick it out tbh, 4u is a tough subject and it might take a few months for you to get really good, that's pretty normal. consider that you haven't written a proper proof in your life up until this point (people at uni studying maths still struggle with writing proofs and "finding the trick", yes they are harder than 4u but it's a hard skill to get), you haven't had to visualise anything in 3 dimensions before, you haven't proved any inequalities before etc. these aren't like adv/3u skills where if you crunch enough textbook questions you'll be okay, the only way to improve at these things is to see a lot of different questions and approaches and try to use these when you encounter a different question, eventually your toolbox will be big enough to where you can solve 75% of questions effectively (which will already give you a very high grade) and that leaves a good chunk of your time left to try various approaches to tackle the harder questions. it's just like physics, you're always going to be given a different scenario and you have to become adaptable to anything
the same thing is also going to be true for any future "hard" subjects (since you're doing med/chem/bio related stuff, just wait until you hit university level organic chem, biochemistry etc), so it's good to have training in how to get good at these types of subjects [memorisation subjects are obviously very different]. last sem i had one of those subjects (real analysis) which was essentially a bunch of advanced proofs on single variable calculus. when you start it's a brick wall and very frustrating, you know no techniques so you can easily spend hours trying to get a solution. however eventually, either through reading the proofs given to us, observing how the lecturer proved things, textbook/tutorial questions and so on, you eventually have a large enough catalogue of techniques so that you know how to approach the vast majority of questions. it might take a couple of months (longer for 4u since u have 0 experience) but eventually you get there.
for a 4u example, i'd always fail on complex number proofs, especially on roots of unity, when they would show up because the results seemed to be out of nowhere. but eventually you see that most of the proofs come down to using the few facts that you have, e.g. factorising z^n = 1, |w^2| = w*wbar = 1, etc. once you know that, you can try all of things that you know, and eventually find the route to the solution. i got to that point maybe term 2-3 year 12, whereas at the beginning i would only try to use the definition because that's all that i really knew. also the nice thing about 4u is that a lot of the questions are of a similar style. if you've done all of the new syllabus papers on thsc, you'll notice that from year to year there's always a few questions that use near identical techniques. once you know those, you can fairly easily finish the majority of q11-14, so don't give up until you've thoroughly exposed yourself to as many questions as possible and keep grinding
