On Monday, I took the annual Chicago ARML tryout. This test is 24 questions in ARML-style (with questions slightly easier than actual ARML questions) and determines the 30 people who will make up the A and B teams, as well as juniors or underclassmen who can make the C and D teams.

Two years ago, I got a 20/24 on this test, with only Kevin Sun (22/24) and James Tao (24/24... of course ) doing better than me. Last year, I got the only perfect score on the tryout, and was hoping to do so this year again... and I did! Hopefully after an awful PUMaC performance this will boost my confidence in non-olympiad competitions.

On Tuesday, I took the 2015 AMC 12 A. This test didn't really matter much to me as I have auto-USAMO qualification, but I still wanted to beat a certain person wearing a NY Giants cap. I flew through the first 15 questions, and #16 took about 5 minutes before I figured out how to find an altitude. #17 was some simple casework (also standard Fibonacci stuff works too) and #18 was pretty easy with SFFT. I Pythagorean Theorem bashed #19, and then Pythagorean Theorem bashed #20 as well. #21 was pretty easy as both the maximum and minimum cases were pretty natural and the coordinates were nice to work with. On #22 I misread "more than three" as "three or more" so correctly got A for my interpretation, but unfortunately A was not correct for the actual problem. #23 was surprisingly easy geometric probability and #25 was just Descartes' Theorem. Unfortunately I had no time for #24, but at that point I thought I was going to get 144 so I guessed (wrong) to try and get a perfect.

So, I got a 138. Ugh if the test went perfectly (not counting good guesses) and I just went for optimal score I could have gotten a 145.5.