Level: AS and A2 (Full)

This A level course builds on work covered in GCSE Maths at Higher Level, so you need to be familiar with all the mathematics at this level, and your skills should be at least up to GCSE Grade B standard. If you have not studied maths for some time, it would be advisable to brush up your skills by revising some of the Higher Level GCSE topics. One way to do this is on the BBC website "GCSE Bitesize" which provides an interactive revision programme.

This course is designed for students working at home. The topics are presented in small "chunks" with worked examples followed by activities for the student. Revision tests are provided after every three or four sections, and there is a Test Paper at the end of each module, which is a mock exam, so you should revise the content of the module before you do the Test Paper.

You will need a graphics calculator, but you will also need to be skilled in manipulating numbers without using a calculator. In particular, no calculator is allowed in the exam for the first module, and the work in this module is built around working out answers without a calculator.

This course is self-contained; you can learn everything you need by working through the materials provided. But if you want to read the same content elsewhere, the best resource is the series of books written especially for the AQA Specification. These are published by Oxford University Press, and the series title is "Advanced Maths for AQA". The books relevant to this course are:

Core Maths C1 + C2, Core Maths C3 + C4, Statistics S1 and Statistics S2.

On this course you work at your own pace. Each module exam can be taken in January or May/June of each year. So you will need to do some forward planning to work out when you will be ready to take the exams, and you will need to register your exam entries at least three months before the exam period. All administrative details, including exam timetables, can be found on the AQA website.