How do I prevent carelessness on SAT MATH

pwcpeng
Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:58:03 +0000

Dr. Steve is absolutely right about the two types of “careless mistakes.”

1) actual careless mistakes where you wrote down a + but somehow copied it wrong in the next step as -, or maybe you stupidly added 3 + 7 as 9, or -2 + 10 as 12.

2) trap careless mistakes that the SAT and the ETS (evil testing serpent) love to employ

I was in your same boat back in high school - knew every math problem down pat. The problem? A score stuck in the mid to high 600s. I then broke 700 and got a 720…still wildly disappointing because I knew I was an 800 student. Finally I got an 800 on my last try by realizing how to eliminate “careless errors” - meaning the second type.

Here’s the biggest secret about preventing the second type of careless errors:
Understanding that what you’ve been trained to solve for in school is NOT ALWAYS what the SAT is asking for.

We all know in school, we always solve for x. Get it down the simplest form. X = whatever, right?

The SAT writers love to exploit that fact. They will DELIBERATELY not ask for the value of x. They want to know y, or 2x, or x + 2, or something else. Yes, sometimes they ask just for x too, but a lot of times not!

YOU MUST RE-READ THE QUESTION BEFORE YOU ANSWER. Physically circle what they are asking for. If you don’t physically circle and think you can just remember to check beforehand, you’re wrong. You won’t. I hate circling and underlining too. Too bad, do it.

Here’s the thing: when you start solving a math question, esp. one with a lot of steps, you become INVESTED in your work. You want to solve it all the way down to its simplest form…which is x = whatever.

And for sure, x will be one of the answer choices. You get so excited you knew how to do the problem and that you figured out x, so your instinctively bubble in the first choice that matches.

Unfortunately, the question was asking for 2x. Maybe 2x was even your second to last step. You had 2x = 10, so therefore x = 5. But the answer is 10, not 5 because they want to know what 2x is, not x.

If you play COD (call of duty), there’s something called the Last Stand - one final chance to kill your enemy. The SAT has their own version of the last stand for math. This is it. The last stand is to not ask you what you expect to be asked (x), but to ask you something else. You must take ONE EXTRA STEP and check what they are really asking.

BEAT THE LAST STAND and you’ll cut your “careless” mistakes in half.

The other trick is to recognize the patterns in your careless mistake.

Popular careless mistake traps:

1. make you solve for x, then ask for y (or 2x, or x-squared, or x + 2, etc.)

2) make you solve for the area…then ask for perimeter, or vice versa

3) ask you what x-squared is…which turns is is something like 25, so you automatically pick 5 (which is x) instead of 25 (which is what they really are asking)

4) you find out the radius…they are actually asking for diameter

5) make you figure out a bunch of stuff about the area of a circle…then ask for circumference

6) you take the square root instead of squaring (second power), or vice versa

7) you take half instead of doubling

8) ask you how many peanuts Bobby has…but make the number of peanuts Jill has a choice as well

9) add % to the answer choices (remember 0.1% is not the same as 0.1). You probably correctly solved the question and got 0.1 as your answer, but then you wrongly choose 0.1%…because correct answer would be 10%

10) make you solve question in feet…but make answer in yards or inches. But of course the “correct” answer in feet is also present in the choices (same with seconds, minutes, hours, days)

11) mention triangles (so now you’re thinking about triangles and 180 degrees, etc.), but then ask something about squares at the last second

12) make you break up a larger shape into smaller more manageable shapes…so like a big triangle turns into two identical smaller triangles. You solve for the area of one of the smaller triangles, then forget you have to double it at the end because question wants the area of the BIG triangle (two small triangles together)

Study the above list of traps so that when you see “perimeter” you automatically think to check if they are asking for “area” and so on.