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Hi Everybody

I'm sure a lot of members and I wish for a list of important calculus "tricks" to use in the exam. These can range from the thought process one should go through when seeing a calculus question, important "shortcuts" we should be able to identify, common questions in the papers, etc. Everyone (especially you budding math geniuses), please do contribute! Hopefully we can create a good resource for students to refer to.

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Well that thread's more of general exam tips. Specific calculus tips would be really helpful as its practically the biggest topic in HL math, and some tips would be great for getting at least some marks in the papers. I'm kinda bad at calculus in general, so I can't exactly contribute much to this, but hopefully some of the other forum members can help!

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Ummm calculus tips?

Well let's see...

You've just got to be cautious when calculating derivatives. i.e should I use the quotient rule, chain rule, etc.

Another thing I find really useful is: let's say you just differentiated an expression, integrate it and make sure that you get what you initially started with. And if you integrated, then differentiate to make sure that you've done the right thing.

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  • 3 weeks later...

When dealing with integrals I tend to see if it can be evaluated in order by:

1) direct integration (watch out for those sneaky inverses of trigonometric functions!)

2) substitution

3) trigonometric substitution

4) integration by parts

Keep in mind that integration by parts are often used when it comes to things that eventually vanish and turn into constants, once you have decided what term to integrate and what term to differentiate do not switch as this will turn into the original integral.

There are often sneaky substitutions, but in the papers you don't have to know these (such as partial fractions!) but they are handy to know.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Also, make sure to remember which variable you're supposed to be differentiating; this especially helps with related rates questions, where you can represent different things with different letters. For example, V= (pi)(r^2)(h) and if you're differentiating with respect to r, then treat h like a constant. I've made that mistake a couple of times and ended up with wildly different answers.

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