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I noticed that during big tests, I think the percieved time pressure and high stakes mimic countdown rounds in mathcounts, so my brain defaults to a countdown round mentality. while this is fine in contests like mathcounts, where the first ~10 questions on sprint rounds are essentially countdown round questions and it gives me a chance to get into the flow of things, on tests like the AMC 10 this can really hurt -- notable examples of this include #2 on this year's 10A which was a system of equations. when i saw that the system didn't neatly add to get the desired answer, i panicked and spent ~3 minutes trying to find a neat way before ending up skipping it and coming back to it after problem 17. this is a really big time waste, and i probably spent ~5 minutes total working on it. however, if the problem was the only thing on the paper, I think i definitely would have solved it in <2.
(other examples could be #7 on this years 10B, which was on . this one i panicked over because i misread as on this problem and didn't get an answer choice, so i again ended up skipping this one and spending way too long on it)
while these aren't necessarily huge time wastes, the psychological affect of skipping an early problem can really impair ur mental state while doing later problems as you won't be as confident
how do i counteract this, and get into the 'flow state' immediately? on mocks this doesn't happen, only in real contests.
also on the AIME this isn't a problem
(other examples could be #7 on this years 10B, which was on . this one i panicked over because i misread as on this problem and didn't get an answer choice, so i again ended up skipping this one and spending way too long on it)
while these aren't necessarily huge time wastes, the psychological affect of skipping an early problem can really impair ur mental state while doing later problems as you won't be as confident
how do i counteract this, and get into the 'flow state' immediately? on mocks this doesn't happen, only in real contests.
also on the AIME this isn't a problem
This post has been edited 2 times. Last edited by happypi31415, Nov 16, 2024, 3:04 PM