Vikram

Tutoring Experience

I have significant tutoring experience in Olympiad-style maths, having run a group tuition session for 15-20 students for 3 years to help them train for the Singapore Maths Olympiad.

By both sharing different tips and tricks for Olympiad-type problems and ensuring that we covered all the available past papers as thoroughly as possible, one of my students was able to win his first ever Gold Medal in the Open Section of the SMO, and several other students won Silver and Bronze Medals.

In addition, I have over 1 year experience voluntarily tutoring A-Level Maths and Further Maths to a small group of 3-4 students.

Tutoring Approach

STEP/MAT Tuition Approach

I believe that the only requirement to excel at STEP/MAT is to be passionate about the content in A-Level Maths, combined with a desire to practice past papers!

I prepared for both MAT and STEP recently, and compiled a list of tips/tricks that keep recurring in past paper questions, which I would love to share with my students. Once learned, these can undoubtedly give you a competitive edge in these exams. From experience, the best way to prepare for STEP/MAT is to do as many past papers as possible, but I often found that solutions were unintuitive and I could never understand how I could arrive at a solution in the exam: that is exactly what I try to focus on in my tuition. In addition to explaining the different approaches to a problem, I try to explain the thought process behind the question and frame it in a way that can be replicated under the time constraints in the exam!

I also like to focus on the often neglected Mechanics and Statistics in STEP, since there are topics such as collisions in Mechanics that can broaden your choice of exam questions.

University Maths Tuition Approach

In A-Level Maths, it’s very common to be told a result, such as integration by parts, and then to be given lots of questions that test that technique.

University maths is very different: it’s more about why integration by parts is useful, and where it comes from. Consequently, university maths can be quite daunting initially because it is very proof-heavy and mathematical rigour is required to really get to grips with the content. I incorporate this in my teaching style for university level maths, ensuring that theorems and proofs are always crystal clear and using a wide range of examples/counterexamples to motivate them.

I particularly emphasise having a clear understanding of where the theorems come from and why they are useful, and how this can be used to tackle more challenging problems at university.