How to improve on MAT

This question has probably been asked many times but the main advice I see is "just do past papers". I have been doing TMUA and MAT past papers for the past month and as of the time of writing(about a month and a half till the MAT and a month until TMUA) I have 6 MAT papers and 5 TMUA papers which haven't been done. I have been averaging about a paper every 2 days since school started but so far I have been consistently averaging the average interviewee score, so it feels like my scores have plateaued. How can I best improve my score with the limited number of past papers I haven't done such that I can get closer and hopefully get above the average offer holder score? I have tried to review my questions in-depth but I am losing a lot of marks particularly in the multiple choice section, across all the papers I am averaging 7/10 in MCQ, and I am losing marks on old spec Q5 but that may be due to timing.

Apologies again if this question has already been asked and sufficiently answered(if so I would be grateful if you could send a link to that thread)

Reply 1

RealFireWizard

When you do past papers, don't just do them, mark them, look at the steps, and decide that's enough. If you drop marks on a question, look at why you dropped marks. Then, try to understand why you use that method to answer that question, and don't move on until you truly understand (not just "I see why that works"; it needs to be "I see why they did what they did and why it works"). You need to understand every step in this manner, and once you have, ask yourself whether you could answer a similar question (i.e let's say the question is how many solutions does (x^2 + 1)^10 = 2x - x^2 -2. Could you do another question like (x^3 - 1)^9 = 2x^2 - 4x + 3?) If not, then you need to stay on that question until you get it.