Additional Notes

Set your north star.

Aim to finish two past papers back to back — Paper 1 and Paper 2, no break — each in half the time. What I do not mean is "you MUST hit this state or you're finished," or "set a half-time timer and panic if it runs out." I mean: know that's the ideal, and channel your obsession into the process that gets you there. Obsession only has utility when poured into procedure. Obsession over outcomes is both counterproductive and stressful.

Hurrying does not make you finish faster.

Writing the numbers faster does not make you finish faster — remember this. I still make this mistake when I start to panic, and it's just stupid. You cut time by streamlining the process. Proper thought flowing through gives the consequence of finishing faster. Speed, like the score, is the byproduct of a good process — not the other way around. Trust the process; the clock takes care of itself.

You don't need perfect laminar flow.

This sounds like it contradicts the last point, but it doesn't. In the actual room, with the clock ticking, you do not need a perfect process and you shouldn't expect one of yourself. Even the best mathematicians stumble on a handful of questions they can't start on the first read — that's completely fine, if not normal. If you're stuck for 3 to 5 minutes (or whatever threshold you set), pass it and move on. You layer through each paper: solve what you can on the first skim, maybe 10 to 12 questions, then come back to the ones you had some idea of.

No weird tactic. Just start at question 1.

You don't need an exam routine of attacking certain question types first. Start from question 1 and go through the motion. Don't overthink it. You probably won't solve everything on the first pass — that's expected.

Know the truth: you can and will solve every problem.

Every question is solvable, and all of it sits inside the syllabus you're studying in sixth form. So you have the capability and the capacity to solve every question on the paper. Knowing this helps. Ironically, the students who score best tend to be the ones with the borderline-delusional belief that they can solve it — they try everything, and somewhere along the way something clicks.

The last 15 minutes are deterministic.

Same for every exam. Even without the competence, if you can handle the pressure and think clearly under it, you'll get a good score — and you'll outperform candidates who are more competent but couldn't.

Don't feed your ego by finishing early.

I was lucky — I met questions I could solve on the first pass. It would've been stupid to fold my arms and watch everyone else toil, because I could've been the one sweating once results dropped. Kill your ego and your pride. Re-solve the questions and hunt for calculation errors while you still have time. You'll be tempted to assume you did fine and move on — don't. Use every minute you have, even if that means going through the same paper three times. I re-solved my entire paper three times, and on the third pass question 7 or 8 had a calculation error. A wave of fear hit me — God, if 8 is wrong, there must be more after it — and time was up. End of Paper 1. So I walked into Paper 2 convinced I'd made a pile of mistakes, Paper 2 opened hard, and I'm sitting there thinking okay, I'm not getting into Cambridge, that's it, why are You doing this to me God — and just spiral.

Emotions are independent variables from how it actually went.

True for every university exam you'll sit later in life, too. What you feel in the arena and what actually happened are very different things. We amplify our errors and magnify our mistakes while writing off the questions we nailed. So you did better than you think. Being brutally honest: I walked out thinking I got something like a 7. (Thank God.)

The two that break the most people — one more time.

• Set your north star. Aim to finish two past papers back to back, each in half the time. Don't be obsessive about the outcome — that just drives you nuts. Don't set a half-time timer and panic when it runs out. Know that's the ideal, and pour the obsession into the process.
• Avoid the stupid pitfalls. Hurrying does not make you finish faster. Writing faster does not make you finish faster. You cut time by streamlining the process — by perfecting procedure, not by hurrying the fuck up.