Help with Paper 1 exam

[kiwi.at.heart]

At the moment I have this one little problem that is currently screwing my grade up in HL maths. I am hopeless with accuracy.

Let me explain. I am pretty good at maths. Even with the huge syllabus, I find most of it easy to remember and understand. With Paper 2 practices, I average about 90% usually and this is not a problem as long as I have my calculator. It is when I don't have my calculator things get bad. I just got my exam back that I did end of last year and I got 59% on it. However, every single mark I lost on it but 2 was due to stupid little error like saying 2+4=8 or 3²=6. In fact there was only 2 question on the whole exam which I got full marks for, and every other question i managed to get every method mark possible, but would loose 2 or 3 marks at the end.

I would like to achieve a 7 in maths, but if my paper 1 scores and my accuracy doesn't improve dramatically, it's not going to happen and I will struggle to get a 6. I was just wondering if anyone had any tips that would help me either not make so many mistakes in my workings or ways to help pick up the errors when I look over my work. Any help would really be appreciated.

[Ezeh]

The way i kind of proof-read-on-the-go, is after every "line" or equation of working out i do, i repeat it quickly in my head.

You may accidently mistake the 2+4 as multiplication, but if you took the extra 1-2 seconds or whatever, and said to yourself, "2+4=8", it should hopefully occur to you that there is something wrong

i'm not sure if that method would help you, but that's just something i have got in the habit of doing, being a victim of the same mistakes that you said you have made.

[ZiggyM]

I have the exact same problem! And it isn't just maths either, which is frustrating!

I'd say the only thing I can think of to do is to just proof read your work (in all the free time we will have in the exam..) But I agree with Ezeh, it's something that could help (if you are lucky!). Reading outloud in your head (not as stupid as it sounds!) I find helps quite a bit as it's the same in english, if it doesn't flow, you become a bit suspicious of the smaller things, the simple mistakes like you have said.

Other than that, I'm not sure there is overly much you can do! I think it's just a thing that comes with practice, or with a calculator! Actually, just doing the majority of your exercises from your textbook without your calculator can help quite a bit. Yes you of course need it for some things, but maybe try to do ALL of your simple maths (multiplication, addition etc) the long way, using your brain Writing out things completely in full also helps as you see how every part of the equation develops. Hope that helped a little

[Sandwich]

I used to make a lot of errors like this as well, even just stuff like copying out the original question wrong and then doing the whole thing incorrectly!

Leaving time at the end of the exam to re-work all of your working out and double check it is a good idea. The other one is trying to make yourself look at it in a different way, e.g. by challenging yourself with stuff like 2+4=8, so ask yourself is 8-4 = 2?

Reading it/writing it out again backwards also helped me, like 8 = 4 + 2. Makes you look slightly mental on paper, but you can scribble it out and it's really useful for picking up chronic errors. Ultimately you have to make yourself look at it critically in some way, be that by challenging yourself, reversing things or whatever, which is hard when we tend to skim whatever we see!

At least you're okay with the calculator I used to put it into my calculator wrong, I'd go back through all my working at the end and have 60% questions with errors or something totally idiotic!

Know where you tend to make mistakes - e.g. +/x, getting negative numbers mixed up with positive numbers, copying the next line of working out incorrectly and so on, then look specifically for those things in everything you do.

[Guest Red XII]

In all but the really cruel problems, the numbers and equations work out fairly nicely for paper 1 (where "nicely" is of course relative to the rest of Math HL...). If the numbers or equations start getting really weird or complex, or if you get some crazy decimals/fractions, you probably made some sort of mistake - quickly check for any little errors. If you haven't made any little errors, you may be doing the problem wrong, in which case you must quickly decide whether to keep working on it or to try to pick up marks on a different problem that you're more likely to get right.

In addition to that, knowing yourself is extremely important. Carefully check your common errors. For me, I make lots of mistakes when expanding large expressions with lots of positives and negatives, and make mistakes with dropping negatives in general, so I pay close attention to these types of things and spend extra time checking my work. Since you probably won't have time to even do all the problems, you don't have time to double-check everything. Double-check your common errors and things that you can check by quickly scanning. If it's going to take an extra minute to check your answer, move on.