Review, Culminating, and Exam

Here are some tips and reminders as we reach the end of the Math course. I hope you have learned a lot of new things and that you remember them. It is important to understand how to apply the skills you have picked up. You will likely continue math for a long time, if not in school, then in life

As a reminder, here is the breakdown of all your marks:

• 70% - everything we have done in this course this year
• 20% Final exam in January
• 3% Culminating Activity part I - Review questions and Study Notes
• 7% Culminating Activity Part II - Who's Coming to Dinner?

While you can use these 3 summative evaluations to boost your mark, the reality is that students generally perform at about the same level, and their mark rarely changes. So whether you are at the high end or the low end, it is likely that your mark will not change by more than 2-3% up or down.

Learning Skills: Your learning skills are probably the most important part of your education, including this math course. Putting you in groups is meant to make you collaborate with each other. If you refuse to work with the people you are supposed to, this will be reflected in the evaluation of your Learning Skills. If you do not make good use of your class time, or if you distract yourself or others, this will be reflected in your Learning Skills. These are the most useful skills you will learn as a person.

Exams: The exam will be 1.5 hours long, but you will have 2 hours to write it. For a few of you, you might get additional time if you need it. You will receive a formula sheet for the volume and surface area formulas - you don't need to memorize this - there is a copy of the formula sheet on this page below. The exam questions will be, in general, slightly easier than the test questions; but because you have to answer questions from the whole course, it will be feel naturally more difficult. The key, of course, is to study and prepare efficiently beforehand, over the next 3-4 weeks.

Textbooks: You must return your textbook on or before the day of the exam. If you do not return the textbook, you may not be allowed to write the exam. Textbooks are the property of CIS and if you don't have your textbook, you must pay for the cost of the textbook, plus a 20% restocking fee. The total charge for the Grade 9 math textbooks is about 2,700,000VND. If you return someone else's textbook, it doesn't count - it must be the same textbook that you borrowed from the Library.

Review: You have a lot of avenues to review and you should take advantage of all of these.

• doing the culminating activities is already very good review
• doing old tests and quizzes and showing your work and writing out your answers
• talking and studying math in groups can be effective if you use your time wisely
• watching the videos online or new videos for things you missed, etc. can be useful for learning things
• asking your friends or me when you have problems is very effective
• go through your binder and organize all of your notes from the course in order so that you have things organized and easy to find will save you time
• doing practise problems from the textbook or the review packages are good ways to study
• reviewing notes and reading over notes is probably the least effective way to review, but you should do a little bit of this

Culminating Activities: you may ask each other for help and suggestions, but the final product must be done on your own. Plagiarism on a culminating activity is a good way to get 0 for the culminating task and possibly fail the course. We are a school that values honesty in all areas, including academics.

Taking Math in Grade 10: If you are achieving below 70%, I would strongly suggest you take Applied Math in Grade 10. If you are achieving below 60%, then you definitely want to take math Applied. Grade 10 and especially Grade 11 math will be too difficult for you if you can only do 60% of the math we have learned. I will be contacting your parents about this. If you fail Grade 9 Math, you will have to take it again. If you get a 49%, that is a failure, as you have not demonstrated sufficient skills to pass the course. This will be a big problem for you.