Starting University and Struggling with Mathematics

Since I entered university in 2025, the first semester has already ended, but in some of the classes I’m taking in the second semester, high school math knowledge is required, and I’m in quite a bad shape.

Calculus shows up at university and the price for not studying it in high school is catching up… (In the Australian curriculum it was an elective, so I only did the equivalent of Mathematics I and A)

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I attended an Australian international school in Malaysia, and as part of the Victoria curriculum (VCE) I took a subject called “General Mathematics.” In this curriculum there are three types of math subjects:

• General Mathematics
• Mathematical Methods
• Specialist Mathematics You can tell roughly from the names: General Mathematics is the basic level, and Specialist is for people who like math and want to study it more deeply. I viewed math as a tool and didn’t like it that much, so I took General Mathematics.

The scope covered by General Mathematics is roughly equivalent to Mathematics I and Mathematics A in Japan. The biggest features are that it assumes the use of a CAS-enabled graphing calculator and includes topics not found in Japanese curricula like financial mathematics, matrices, and network theory.

Students aiming for STEM fields are generally required to take Mathematical Methods, and without it you sometimes can’t enter science or engineering faculties. That course covers the equivalents of Mathematics II, B, and C.

Specialist Mathematics is the most advanced, often taken by those aiming for engineering, and is said to be at Mathematics III level plus university introductory level.

I love engineering and am basically a STEM person, yet I took General, so I’m still struggling a lot…

But this system isn’t necessarily bad — I actually think it might be better than Japan’s. In Japan, even humanities students need a decent level of math, and in general tracks you probably need to reach about the Mathematical Methods level. That does raise the overall math level of the population, but if it’s just cramming and people end up forgetting it, the effectiveness might be limited.

Also, the financial mathematics covered in General Mathematics has been pretty useful (I remember it when investing in mutual funds or depositing money), so I’m glad I learned it. Personally, I also think it was good to learn network theory and matrices earlier — they end up getting used quite a lot. In Japan these are often expressed with formulas, but in Australia network theory and matrix calculations appear without many formulas. If anything, they skip the calculation details and have you input things into the calculator. In General Mathematics, math feels treated as a tool for everyday life.