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Advice

This is a collection of all my advice on applying to Maths at Oxbridge and similar courses:

  • This is a Google Drive folder I made which contains everything I used and some things I've come across since. It's built on top of a folder by Izaac Mammadov. For information on how to use the folder and basically all of my thoughts on maths admissions at Oxford and Cambridge, read this.
  • A document of STEP tips made by Abigail Tan is here. While preparing I made a document of things I commonly made mistakes on which is here.
  • My thoughts on the personal statement and 'supercurriculars'.
  • I have done videos of solving STEP questions for various things including the Mathematics Open Day. These can be found here.
  • I have also written some interview questions. Some of these are standard questions which you should be aware of. If you get stuck there are hints for the questions. You can go through these questions yourself, with a friend or if you would like me to mock interview you, you can contact me at vg354@cantab.ac.uk. I also offer tutoring services for MAT, STEP and TMUA - you can contact me by email about those too.
  • Advice on picking colleges.

STEP Mark Schemes

This is a separate section as there's a fair amount to say about these. There are a few mark schemes, some better than others and some have gaps in them so when I prepared I used a mix of several of them.

  • The best one is the one in the google drive folder above as they come with mark breakdowns. With other mark schemes you'll have to guess marks so try to use these when possible!
  • One which is really complete (but at times hard to read) are the solutions on integral. I usually preferred other solutions when possible but these will always have your back. If that link doesn't work for accessing the solutions, this link might. If prompted for a username and password, they are 'mei-step' and 'Stepaea1' without the apostrophes.
  • TSR has a lot of solutions which can range from very well written to broken latex with a fair amount of gaps. You can find these by searching the STEP paper you want + the year with solutions e.g TSR STEP 3 2007 solutions. Often there is broken latex but chatgpt can fix and display this for you even if you don't know latex.
  • Here is some mark schemes from pastpaperpanda which I've never used. Another mark scheme I've never used are the ones from Physics and Maths tutor.