Why am I performing poorly on the AMC 10?

I am a 9th grader in the US, and I have been working very hard on trying to improve my score in the AMC 10 competitions. I got the AoPS Volume 1 and 2 books, as well as Intro to Number Theory. I also used Brilliant's Contest Math II course. I took multiple AMC 10's from past years, and I would consistently get around 85 or 90. The highest I ever got in one of these tests was 96, which was something I was proud of. However, when I took the AMC 10 A and B this year, I performed very poorly. I was only able to answer 8 questions on each of them. Is there any particular reason why this is happening? Am I approaching the contest the wrong way? Are there better ways to prep for the AMC 10?

Note by Rohith Muthukumart
4 months ago

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Comments

Hey there! Although I didn't participate in AMC 10 this year (I'm not from USA :) ), but I did AMC 10 last year and I also performed much worse than you tho:) So don't get yourself too stressed up, it's OK to not do well in contest math, as long as you love mathematics! Moreover, try solving more harder problems on no.15-25 and don't give up on your math journey! Also, you should do contest math just because you love it and actually when you start to explore more, you will realize that contest math is really just a small section of Math, there are a lot more fields and more fruitful stuffs out there!

I think you should really think: 1. Why am I doing all these? (Contest math)

  1. Do I enjoy doing all these?/ Am I having fun?

  2. What do I want to become in the future?

If you know the answers to the above questions, then you really appreciate doing contest math in my opinion. So, why is this happening? Mainly there are two possibilities:

  1. You are keen to do well on the contest but because of lack of practice or you got stressed up, you performed badly.

  2. You are not doing it because of your passion.

For the way of approaching the contest, well, just solve more problems and relax! In fact, we're not God, we're humans, we don't really have to excel in everything, everyone has its weakness and strength but we can improve on our weakness (in this case, by solving harder problems). You can also read this by Evan Chen: Stop Looking For The Right Training! .

In terms of ways to practise for AMC 10, it's really just solving more hard problems especially past AMC's, I would also recommend Art of Problem Solving forum which contains lots of contest problems.

Hope that this advice helps :)

ChengYiin Ong - 4 months ago
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