General Maths

1. What people don't quite understand about General Maths...

General Maths is often looked down upon as the easy maths, but this is kind of far from the truth. To be honest, by the time we hit year 8, you've covered pretty much any amount of maths that you'll ever need to know, and everything beyond that is generally just not practical to life.

Even in General Mathematics, you learn topics that are not all that practical, they're a little bit esoteric, they don't really apply to life very much, but there are a number of degrees that need you to take some sort of maths.

Now, it's not an easy maths, it's probably easier than the other ones, like Maths Methods or Specialist Maths, but if you don't need to study a maths for the university course that you want to get into, there's no particular reason to study it. And if you're worried that this is just the easy maths, well, it's not. General Maths is still a relatively tough subject if you aren't all that good with numbers.

2. Should you pick General Maths?

When deciding what subjects you're going to study in year 11 and year 12, and particularly which maths, whether it's General Maths or another subject, one of the key things to look at is, one, what do you want to do in the future, which is a pretty hard question to ask a 16-year-old, to be honest, and two, is maths something that you like and are good at?

So, it's worth investigating and starting to go to universities and see if there's anything that resonates with you as a subject that you want to do, and then decide what you want to do from there. Now, if you don't end up studying a maths and something requires general maths as a prerequisite, then it's not really necessarily that big of a deal because a lot of universities have bridging courses anyway. So, you're probably better off just picking subjects you're good at and enjoy, and that's probably the field you want to get into anyway.