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making mistakes

im doing a-level maths and i ALWAYS make silly and stupid mistakes. i lose the easiest marks by this.
is there something i can do to avoid this?
Reply 1
Do more questions, it gets better with practice. Try to identify where are the most likely places that you slip up on and pay extra attention during those places (like long multiplication/integrals etc etc).
Reply 2
See where you are going wrong, write them all in a book / notepad etc regardless of how easy they may seem ( ie expanding brackets), and read them over and over. Hopefully you will remember the mistakes and avoid them in an exam
Original post by cooldudeman
im doing a-level maths and i ALWAYS make silly and stupid mistakes. i lose the easiest marks by this.
is there something i can do to avoid this?


:five:........practice makes perfect!
I do the same thing, i just have to spend a lot of time practicing. Actually in the exam i usually end up doing most of the paper twice to see if i get the same answer both times. I make the most mistakes with signs and so i check those (but i dont know about you).
Original post by cooldudeman
im doing a-level maths and i ALWAYS make silly and stupid mistakes. i lose the easiest marks by this.
is there something i can do to avoid this?


A lot of the time you can check your answers. In fact when I was doing C3 practise papers, about 70% of the questions I had a method to double check my answer. Whether that was by substitution of unknown variable back into an equation. Or on integration, differentiate to check you get the original. When you're simplifying an expression try values of variable before and after to check they're the same. If you're using simpsons rule or trapezium rule check that your value is close to the numerical integral if you calculator has that function. When you're solving cubics or quadratics, again if you calculator has the function you can check with that too. If you're doing stats you can input your data into a table and check your mean, std dev etc. In mechanics you can often use dimension analysis to check you have the correct answer (actually this is probably more useful for C3 related rates of changes etc). Also if you have a graphical calculator you can plot the graph which might help you.

Another bit of advice I was given was to evaluate everything I do as I go along. I double check and reason what I'm doing so I don't do make unecessary errors. I hope this helps.
Original post by boromir9111
:five:........practice makes perfect!


the first time a saw those smiles i thought they were licking tongues =p
haha
Reply 7
Original post by Freerider101
A lot of the time you can check your answers. In fact when I was doing C3 practise papers, about 70% of the questions I had a method to double check my answer. Whether that was by substitution of unknown variable back into an equation. Or on integration, differentiate to check you get the original. When you're simplifying an expression try values of variable before and after to check they're the same. If you're using simpsons rule or trapezium rule check that your value is close to the numerical integral if you calculator has that function. When you're solving cubics or quadratics, again if you calculator has the function you can check with that too. If you're doing stats you can input your data into a table and check your mean, std dev etc. In mechanics you can often use dimension analysis to check you have the correct answer (actually this is probably more useful for C3 related rates of changes etc). Also if you have a graphical calculator you can plot the graph which might help you.

Another bit of advice I was given was to evaluate everything I do as I go along. I double check and reason what I'm doing so I don't do make unecessary errors. I hope this helps.


yeah thanks for the advice. ill definitely keep it in mind.

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