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STEP Support Programme

Doing STEP questions

How much time do you think we should spend on doing a step question before giving up?

How about if your doing step questions for the first time?

This will depend wildly on how much practice you have and what the question is, it's not uncommon to spend an hour or two on a question at the very beginning, especially on the longer challenging questions. However, as time goes on you should find that you can often do some of the questions that have shortcuts in 15-20 minutes, however that's non-standard. Standard advice (which I disagree with, FWIW) is that you're doing good if you can do a question in 45 minutes. Personally, I feel that 45 should be replaced with 30.

But yeah, hour or more at the beginning is nothing to worry about. In fact, I'd suggest not caring about the time taken to do questions just yet, that's something you can worry about later. The important thing right now is just being able to do questions, no matter how long they take. STEP is meant to be hard starting out and with enough practice you'll bring that time down drastically. Remember also that in earlier years, question difficulty is a lot more varied, so some questions might be overly long and others will be overly short.

I would argue that sometimes questions with tricks you don't spot can take a lot longer than an hour or two. Indeed I remember staring at a few questions over several days. With STEP problems (and also with university mathematics), sometimes it's worth leaving a problem for a day or two if you've been stuck for a while and then coming back to it and see if you've managed to gain any inspiration. I've found that solutions have sometimes come to me when I've been least expecting it.

To begin with, you will probably need to spend quite a long time on each question, but not necessarily all in one go. Having breaks, sleeping on the problem etc. can often be a good idea and when coming back to the question you often will spot something that you did not see before.

STEP questions often require you to do extended algebra. Whilst in A-levels a nasty looking quartic or something usually suggests that you have gone wrong somewhere, STEP questions can often require you to deal with some formidable algebra. As you get more practice in dealing with this you will speed up.

You are aiming to be able to complete STEP questions in 30-45 mins by June (if you are in Lower UPPER sixth), so there is a reasonable amount of time.

The last bit of advice I would give is to do the Foundation Assignments before branching out onto other STEP questions. The preparation is designed to help you through the STEP questions so that you can complete a wide selection before tackling them by yourself.

Presumably they're aiming to complete STEP questions in 30-45 minutes by June if they're in *Upper* Sixth? I don't think I could complete STEP questions full stop in Lower Sixth. I'd agree with everything else though - learning to solve STEP questions in an exam for me certainly consisted of two distinct phases - "learn to solve the problems in several efforts and think in the right sort of way over time, often trying a question several times over the course of a week" and then "get fast."

I meant Upper sixth! Thanks for that, I will change the previous post (which will make things look a little weird...)

Useful Links

Underground Mathematics: Selected worked STEP questions

STEP Question database

University of Cambridge Mathematics Faculty: What do we look for?

University of Cambridge Mathematics Faculty: Information about STEP

University of Cambridge Admissions Office: Undergraduate course information for Mathematics

Stephen Siklos' "Advanced Problems in Mathematics" book (external link)

MEI: Worked solutions to STEP questions (external link)

OCR: Exam board information about STEP (external link)

AMSP (Advanced Maths Support programme): Support for University Admission Tests (external link)