A new look for JZMaths, and guidance for your next steps

It’s finally here! We’ve spent the past two weeks working hard on a new layout for JZMaths and on better guidance for your preparation. The site had outgrown its old layout, and I hope the redesign feels calmer and makes it easier to find what you need.

What I’m most excited about, though, is what happens after you finish a paper. JZMaths can now suggest another paper suited to your level or highlight a skill worth working on first. Where practice questions are available, you can work on that skill in isolation, at your own level, before tackling another paper. Read on to see how it works!

Around the site

• Clearer navigation: Papers, Skills, Learn, PLUS, News, Guides and About now have their own places in the navigation, with Progress available once you’re signed in.
• Dark mode: something many of you have asked for! Use the moon button in the header to switch themes. Until you choose, the site follows your device’s setting.
• Papers now has two tabs: Sit online for the simulator and Downloads for official papers, Tyler mocks and implied grade boundaries.
• Learn brings the Logic course and Additional Topics together.
• Guides now has a more comprehensive collection of TMUA guides, organised into four groups. If you’re new to the TMUA or have a question about the test or your preparation, this is a good place to start.
• About brings together information about JZMaths, including a page for my YouTube channel.

You can also change your name and email address in Account settings.

Understanding your preparation

The new Progress page replaces the dashboard. It brings together your overall mastery estimate and its likely range, a breakdown by topic, and tabs for your history, corrections and bookmarks.

Your results now compare the time you spent on each question with the median time for students who answered it correctly on their first attempt. You’ll see whether you were faster, slower or about the same. A question you got right but spent ten minutes on might still be worth revisiting!

TMUA Skills

At the heart of the new guidance is TMUA Skills: individual mathematical skills that PLUS beta members can track and practise in isolation. This mirrors what I do in my private lessons: I try to diagnose the exact issue a student is having, then give them practice questions that isolate that difficulty. In my view, this is one of the most effective ways to improve quickly.

One of the features students ask for most is a way to practise questions by topic. I wanted to take that a step further, because the existing topic tags are often too broad to pinpoint a particular difficulty. There are now 60 TMUA Skills (we’re still tinkering with them!), from familiar techniques such as solving simultaneous equations to narrower ideas such as recognising when two sides and a non-included angle can give two different triangles. Each skill has an explanation that’s free for everyone to read. Some already have free teaching videos on YouTube, and every skill will eventually have at least one.

We’ve spent a great deal of time going through the papers question by question, deciding which skills each question calls for and checking those assignments. Most of that work is now done, giving us a basis for tracking how you’re getting on with each skill.

New in PLUS beta

Here’s how the guidance works once you’ve completed a couple of papers:

• Review your mistakes, if you’d like to. After a paper, you can revisit questions you got wrong or left unanswered and say what you think happened. Perhaps a particular skill gave you trouble, you made a calculation slip, or you simply ran out of time. The review gives you a chance to reflect on your work and gives us information your score alone can’t provide.
• See what to work on next. Based on your answers so far and anything you’ve shared in a review, the site suggests a suitable paper or one or two skills worth spending time on first.
• Practise a skill before your next paper. You can see your estimate for each skill and, where practice is available, try short questions suited to your level. Then you can return to a full paper and see how you get on.

Joining PLUS beta is still free once you’ve completed two full papers. The optional PLUS bundle includes all PLUS beta benefits and adds eight more papers. The updated PLUS page explains what’s included in Free, PLUS beta and the bundle.

What’s next

• More skill practice questions. Writing these is my main priority. I’ll start with the skills students are struggling with most.
• Another full calibration of question difficulties and mastery estimates to refine the guidance you receive.
• More free teaching videos on YouTube, again giving priority to the skills students need most help with.
• Two new sets of free mock papers: one from Jackie Tyler and one from me.

A few other improvements are on my list, though these are less urgent:

• Bookmarks: add filtering and let you bookmark a question wherever you encounter it, except during Full exam mode.
• Corrections: give you more ways to filter and order the questions you want to revisit.
• Maths display in the simulator: make fractions and other expressions easier to read and more consistent from one question to the next.
• Topic practice: let you revisit exam questions you’ve already attempted, grouped by topic.
• Solutions for Tyler mocks and past papers: continue adding written solutions where they’re missing.

I’ll work through these gradually. If something is confusing or doesn’t work as you expect, please email me at jzmaths@hotmail.com. I’d also like to know which of the planned additions would help you most.

Your suggestions and corrections have helped shape JZMaths from the beginning. Thank you, and please keep them coming!

Joe