oops, although I guess it’s not too bad (LONG RANT WARNING)
Before
I was like kinda nervous, because even though this wasn’t my first time taking the AMCs (actually 10th time), it’s the first time I’m taking it digitally, and I’m afraid that I would mess up. I probably had to be extra careful as I thought it’s easier to misclick something and ruin my entire test.
Last time I wasn’t rlly satisfied with my score (120 on an extremely easy test), so I don’t want to have bad time management again. I also hope that my AMC10 scores won’t be like my AMC8 ones (strictly decreasing arithmetic sequence). I sillied so bad in the past (4 sillies on AMC8 after reviewing my answers !!!)
The test (?)
So although I was a bit nervous, I tried to tell myself to stay calm, that there’s always a 10B and I had little chances to get into JMO anyway. Still, I didn’t expect the Commons I (where we took the AMC10 in LHS) to be that crowded, which somehow made me even more anxious.
I originally wanted to use some kind of strategy like starting from the middle so that I would feel more confident, but then thought that would be worse as I might not even be able to solve those problems :(
I spent like 2 minutes solving p1 because I was so afraid I might silly the first problem. Then I looked at p2, and this was when all the disaster started.
I stared at the problem for 1 minute, trying to understand it, and finally understood it. But I was afraid that I would silly on the second problem, so I subtracted the two from each other and was stuck because I thought 300 / 0.3 = 100 💀
Then I was stuck for another 5 minutes
I decided that I shouldn’t be stuck on a problem for too long, so I moved on. But after doing every 5 problems, I was like “it’s impossible that p2 was so hard” and went back to get stuck for another 3 minutes. I felt so desperate when I couldn’t even do problem 2 when I was aiming for DHR, and couldn’t stay calm even though I tried to, until I found out that I solved 16 problems and there was 15 minutes left.
I briefly counted and found that I could only get a 109.5 (without any sillies), and I might really get a lower score than last year. Based on past experiences, I on average had 3 sillies per AMC, so I might not even make AIME 💀
I expected myself to panick even more after realizing this, but perhaps it’s that the problems later were easier, I did 18-22 pretty quickly, and also found my mistake in p2. In the last few minutes, I knew that I didn’t really have time to check my answers, so I only made sure that I didn’t click on the wrong option on the computer.
After
I didn’t really check my answers with others since the digital version scrambled the questions and answer choices so that it’s harder to cheat (and I didn’t notice for a while). I knew I probably got a really bad score, considering that I could easily calculate wrong when I’m nervous. Anyways there’s still a B so hopefully I get a better score on that one :<
===== Above was written before I knew the answers (and scores) =====
So turns out that I didn’t have any sillies, giving me a 136.5 (18 higher than expected). It’s still not a very good score considering people saying that this year’s test was also easy like last year, but enough to make me happy I guess. This is probably my first AMC without sillies, which is ironic as people on AoPS said that this was the most silliable test ever.
My distrib: 11111 11111 11111 11111 11bbb
By this time I’ve also finished taking 10B but I probably won’t write a blog about it because I’m lazy and I did very bad despite it’s much easier than 10A imo.
Hopefully 136.5 is enough to get DHR, MAA didn’t release the statistics this time so I dont really know, sad.