If you failed to achieve the mathematics results you were hoping for, getting bad exam results, all is not lost. Taking a year out can be a good move. There are a number of reasons why students fail to achieve the exam grades they were hoping for. Make time to reflect on where things went wrong. There will be many things that you did right of course, but somehow it didn’t come together. Many people do not perform well under stress and focussing on one subject instead of three for an extended period of time will allow you to assess your strengths and weaknesses and recoup.
When we are young, a year seems like a long time but patience is a virtue and needs to be cultivated these days when everyone expects to be able to get immediate satisfaction. Self-reflection and circumspection are all qualities which are sought by employers.
Download a copy of the syllabus and highlight topics that you are less sure about. Be honest. Then highlight those topics you have some idea about and those you are confident at. Now print out a copy of the formula booklet for your syllabus and have this to hand when you practise.
Do you learn better by watching videos of questions being worked through? If that is the case, then there are some websites with videos of questions by topic for you to browse through and watch. www.examsolutions.net is one such website.
When you are ready to try your hand at some exam questions, you can find many places online where they are sorted by topic or where you can download entire past papers. Of course, with the new maths syllabus, you do have to resort to ‘legacy’ questions once you have exhausted the available ‘new’ material. But as you become familiar with the syllabus, you will be come expert at picking through ‘legacy’ papers and identifying which questions are relevant and which are not.