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Studying / practicing for a test,something you don't find very interesting

James H

Hi all,

Some of you may know from previous posts that I am applying to Cambridge University to study Natural Sciences. As part of the application process for this course you need to do the NSAA (presumably Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment.) The test I think is on October 19th so I basically have a month to prepare for it.

The problem is that while I enjoy the content on the exams, the style of questions are boring and repetitive. It doesn't seem to actually test much in the way of analytical approach to questions but instead on speed / accuracy in multiple choice questions. If you read through a couple of papers you basically get variants of the same question each year.

I know I can knuckle down and get a lot of practice in on the questions but I'm finding it really hard to motivate myself. Just repeatedly doing the same question with different numbers and a slightly different approach isn't much fun, when you find it more interesting to think about the approach and *why* it works. It's probably less of a problem for the physics Q's as I find them easy but it's worse for maths because there is content from GCSE that I haven't covered in forever too. Any suggestions on ways to make practicing the questions more enjoyable so I can be more productive? Any ideas to make this less boring would be appreciated! I am at least looking forward (hopefully) to the interview as I think that's much more important than the test score, and the admissions staff will actually get to see my analytical thinking their rather than my capacity to memorize how to do a certain type of question over and over again.

Parents

  • Hi, I'm headed off to Cambridge to start my Natural Sciences degree in exactly a week so this was kind of fun to see this morning. I'm going to do Chemistry, Earth Sciences and Materials science first year.

    Remember the test is super fast so yeah trying to speed up each time is definitely a good thing. I guess they've built up some more resources over the past couple of years but when I did the NSAA there were about 2 practice papers for the new assessment so there wasn't an awful lot of practice we could do, so I was mostly using UKMT challenge papers and chemistry olympiad questions.

    Definitely do the trying to make it faster thing. There are a lot of questions for a short space of time and you will need to practice moving on quickly if you get stuck/go down the wrong train of thought. Have you read through the syllabus to double check the topics included? I found this useful as there were some chem and phys things that we hadn't re gone over in A-level so it refreshed my memory. 

    Should you get to interview, it's designed to mimic a supervision, so it's all about topic based problem solving. I really loved mine (I love problem solving) and my interviewers were quite friendly which helped. For some interviews you are supposed to get stuck because they want to introduce new material/concepts and then see you process and apply it. I went into my interview thinking fun problem solving time with people at the top of their fields which definitely helped the stress levels. 

    Which college are you applying to or is it an open application? Have you had a chance to visit? I was a covid application year so it was only online open days for me. Do not recommend.

  • in reply to Fibonacci Squid

    Hi, Welcome to Cambridge!! :) Which college are you joining? (I was in King's). I hope you have a great time- for me the undergraduate Natsci course was definitely a highlight- I miss my undergrad time. 

  • in reply to Ann :)

    I'm joining Gonville and Caius. I'm really looking forward to the course, and the opportunity to meet people who will be happy to talk about maths and science!

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