bissue wrote:

This problem basically ruined my AMC 12B experience...

Here's what happened when I took the AMC 12B:

After zooming through the first eleven problems like they were Countdown Round problems, I was starting to feel confident in myself, especially in geometry. Questions like #7, #9, #10, and #11 which may have stopped me last year went by in seconds, and I was already proud of myself for figuring out #8 quicker than I expected.

Ooh, another geometry! I excitedly thought to myself. This one should go by rather quickly like the others, especially considering how easy #11 was. Let's see... So you take this weird spot, and draw this weird line to intersect in a weird point on a circle. Huh.
Since I'd been studying geometry for a while, I thought I could easily solve this without coordinates, and coordinate bashing felt like it could be a huge timesink (ironic :dry:

). But after spending much more time on this problem than I would have on any other, I thought there had to be something so obvious I just couldn't see. I needed to take a step back and be patient.
As a result, I proceeded to waste more time patiently staring at a diagram, hoping I'd soon figure out the *trivial* observation that made this problem a #12 rather than a #22. (In case you don't know, the non-coordinates solution to this problem involves drawing an extra line. In other words, it's not trivial. But I didn't know that!) Time was running out, however, so I gave up and went on to #13, already feeling a bit hopeless.

Logarithms. This shouldn't be too bad. First I'll do a change of base, then, uhhhhh, what. How do I deal with this stupid square root?
I had never seen a logarithm problem before stated so simply that wasn't immediately destroyed by simple logarithm properties. Most AIME logarithm problems are super easy, but this one was really puzzling. Luckily I suspected this problem was misplaced and quickly moved on to #14.

Here was the infamous "Bela + Jenn" problem. I knew I couldn't skip this one after already skipping the last two, so I told myself I would stick with this problem, even if it meant making no progress from that point forward. I had almost no combinatorics training at the time, but I had already seen the basic "Winning Positions" and "Copying" strategies before. However, the difficulty of #12 and #13, along with the strange answer choices involving things about Odds vs. Evens and the number $8$ in particular had me scared. I immediately went to starting with an $n=5$ case, but the combination of stress and fatigue building up made this simple task impossible to solve. I focused solely on Even and Odd analysis due to answer choices $(C)$ and $(D)$ , along with possible inductive arguments, but none of those had helped me for obvious reasons. And now I was stuck after already wasting around half an hour on nothing.

Now my mind was fully in panic mode, just like last year when I took the 2019 AMC 10A. (The angle chasing and recurrence problems triggered my panicking back then.) I went back to #12, hoping to get at least six more points, just to coordinate bash it, which turned out not to be as hard as I thought. This desperate mindset went on to #13, where I managed to get the right answer solely by giving a real number estimation and comparing which answer choice had the closest value. Unfortunately, like last year, my hopelessness encouraged me to guess the wrong answer for #14. (Sidenote: Our proctors had given us no time warnings from the time I started #12 to this point, which also contributed to some panicking.)

The rest of the story isn't as interesting. I was much less efficient with the later problems, but I still managed to get answers out of #15 and #16 (which, in my opinion, were much easier than #12, #13, and #14.) The remaining questions intimidated me too much to even try them fully, and I stupidly spent the rest of my time doing #20-25s, despite knowing that I wouldn't be able to get any points from them. I mostly just half solved late problems or read them and moved on immediately without even thinking. I still qualified for AIME, but my 12B score was worse than I expected. At least I had the 10A to back me up.

(I always feel that the first time I take a test, I always feel unnaturally stressed and perform horribly because of it.)

Moral of the Story: Don't let failure ruin your mindset. Even if a test is hard for you, it likely means it's hard for everyone. Panicking in a contest that tests logic of all things is the worst thing you can do.

edit: why was this bumped

aaaaaaaaaaaa