About the syllabus

The course provides opportunities for students to acquire knowledge, understanding and skills at progressively higher levels. It has been designed to offer students the chance to develop an appreciation for mathematics as an activity with its own intrinsic value involving invention, intuition and exploration.

The Mathematics Extension 2 course has been developed with the assumption that students have achieved the outcomes of the Year 11 Mathematics Advanced and Extension 1 courses.

Key content

Mathematics Extension 2 is comprised of five topics:

• Proof
• Vectors
• Complex numbers
• Calculus
• Mechanics

Assessment

Assessment in Mathematics Extension 2 consists of school-based assessment, as well as the HSC examination.

School-based assessment requirements

• A maximum of four assessment tasks with a minimum weighting of 10% and a maximum weighting of 40%
• One task will be an assignment or investigative-style task with a weighting of 15-30%
• Only one task may be a formal written examination with a maximum weighting of 30%.

Additional information

Additional information for teachers

The assignment or investigative-style task

The assignment or investigative-style task provides opportunities for students to demonstrate knowledge and skills in different ways to the HSC examinations. It must include higher-order application and modelling opportunities and the chance for students to communicate and justify abstract ideas and relationships using appropriate language, notation and arguments.

New topics

Proof

The subtopics for proof have a principal focus of developing rigorous mathematical arguments. In many respects, this topic replaces the previous topic of Harder Extension 1 from the previous course. The topic explores the formal language of proof, proof by contradiction, using examples and counter-examples, proving results involving inequalities, proving harder results by mathematical induction, including but not limited to results in algebra, calculus, probability and geometry.

Vectors

This new topic builds upon the exploration of vectors in Mathematics Extension 1 to investigate vectors and vector calculations in three-dimensional space.