Maths SolverThere are three exams that account for almost all of the “maths exam” traffic on this site: the GCSE Maths paper in the UK, the SAT Math section in the US, and the AP Calculus AB/BC paper which sits somewhere between school and university calculus. The notes in this section are not full revision courses — the topic articles in Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, and Arithmetic do that work. These notes are about the exams themselves: what is on each paper, what gets asked most, and how to spend a finite amount of revision time well.
Where a topic on the syllabus is covered in detail elsewhere on the site, we link to it rather than duplicating the explanation. The exam pages should be read alongside the topic guides, not in place of them.
Articles in this section
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SAT Math — what to expect, and where to spend your time
The two modules (Heart of Algebra and Problem Solving / Advanced Math), the topics that come up almost every sitting, and the small handful of formulas the College Board does not give you on the reference sheet.
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GCSE Maths — foundation and higher tier, broken down
The five content areas (Number, Algebra, Ratio & Proportion, Geometry & Measures, Probability & Statistics), the tier-difference content that often catches higher candidates, and a realistic week-by-week revision plan for the run-up.
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AP Calculus AB and BC — the difference, and the syllabus
What AB covers, what BC adds (series, parametric, polar), how the multiple-choice and free-response sections are weighted, and the “calculator-active” vs “non-calculator” split that you have to plan around.
How to use these notes
A revision plan that works well, in our experience: read the relevant exam page first to get the shape of the paper in your head, then work through past papers until you can identify what kind of question something is in under five seconds. The topic guides on the rest of the site are what you reach for when a past-paper question reveals a specific weak spot. Exam preparation is mostly diagnosing your own gaps; once you know the gap, the topic articles fill them in.
What we cannot help with
We do not predict exam questions, and we are not affiliated with the exam boards (Pearson Edexcel, AQA, OCR, the College Board, or the Cambridge International Examinations). Where syllabus details change — and they do, every two or three years — we update the relevant page and add a note to the article’s edit log. Always double-check current syllabus content with your exam board’s own specification document.