I tried a Maths exam as an English Language student

My hypothesis (newly learnt maths word): English students can be good at Maths too.

Living with somebody who studies Maths at uni is basically like living with a vegetarian, a Northerner or someone that took a gap year- they like to tell you about it all the fucking time. You’re eating dinner, you’re at pre drinks or you’re halfway through your social science essay and they keep chipping in with snide comments. ‘That looks easy’, ‘English is a useless degree’- the list goes on.

Note: Don’t challenge them and say that your degree is equally as hard or that you do just as much work, because you’ll end up 20 minutes into a uni maths paper wondering why you didn’t just nod and smile in the first place. So, my experience went a bit like this.

Pen and paper at the ready, like I was ready to re-sit my GCSE Maths – the last time I even attempted to do something as complex as long division. Everyone warned me that I would get no marks, but surely you get marks for working out? Apparently not if all the workings are wrong.

Obviously, when I opened the paper, I expected there to be some X’s, some Y’s and some symbols I’d never seen before. But I was determined to score at least one point. I had faith in my high school grade C and my experience of always being the banker in Monopoly to pull me through.

Question one

When I signed up to this, I didn’t anticipate that I wouldn’t understand the first word. ‘Differentiate.’ So I referred back to the legend that is BBC Bitesize. Even that couldn’t save me. Oops. Nevertheless, I struggled on, adding up the three and the two to make five.

Which made y= 5 . Wrong. Apparently, once you get to degree level, adding no longer counts as Maths. Tell a Maths student that addition is a part of maths and you’re likely to get punched in the face with a very heavy calculator.

Question two

The suffering continued and I decided to cherry pick the easiest looking question in the paper. Remembering in my head the voice of my teacher: ‘Go back and do the hard ones at the end’. Thanks Miss Reardon, your advice has finally come in useful after four long years.

c) ‘What is the area of the triangle ABC?’

Well if you look at it logically in terms of the alphabet, there’s A, B, C and then…. D must be the area. I felt like I had just solved one of life’s big questions, like why is there a god (and if so, why did he event maths in the first place?) My two years of intensely studying the alphabet have finally paid off for something other than completing crosswords.

Once again, D did not turn out to be the answer. Actually, D stands for DON’T even attempt a maths paper. Two questions and 10 short minutes in, my brain felt like it had been microwaved for an hour. Plus, I was bored out of my mind How do people sit through three hours of this bullshit? I decided to attempt one last question, just so I could say I’d had a good go at it.

Question three

b) ‘Sketch the curve y= -cos (0) +  (0) for 0<0<2 ’.

I was always quite good at art, so sketching seemed to be more my kind of scene. Ignoring the numbers, I drew a pretty curve through all of my notes, shut the paper, never looked at it again and opened a grammar book.

To all the maths students out there: I’ll never slag off your degree again. P.S- you’re all mental.

Do I get a gold star for trying?