because we had a snow day
Some Stuff
Originally we were going to take aime i but because of snow day we had to take aime ii. This may be kind of good because historically aime ii has lower cutoffs (and I don’t feel the tests are harder). But maybe this time cracked regions are taking aime ii which will inflate the cutoffs idk.
So I had aime ii and f=ma on the same day (f=ma was delayed to like 5:45-7:00), which probably didn’t make that much of a difference since there’s no way I could’ve gotten >=14 in f=ma. (I’m just bad like that)
I didn’t really expect anything to be honest. Like of course my goal is to make jmo, but I knew that it’s not that likely considering how I would’ve thrown both AMCs if not because I was lucky (and still didn’t get 140+ for AMC 10A, but I guess 136.5 is fine). Also that I haven’t been doing that much math lately since my main objective is to make usaco camp I guess (impossible)
In last year’s aime, I sillied (maybe some of them don’t really count as sillies) my way from 8 to 5, giving me like a 170 index. That’s why I didn’t really expect myself to make jmo, and maybe that turned out to be the right mindset, since I wasn’t too nervous before / during the test.
AIME
For p1, in the beginning my lengths were all wrong because I kept misreading the letters in the lenghts. But at least I finally managed to solve it after like 7 minutes. Then I did p2-4 in the next 15 minutes and found out there’s two geo in a row.
I kind of wanted to skip both since I’m a geo antimain and I didn’t want the geos to give me emotional damage for the entire test. But then I remembered that it’s just p5 and p6 which will hopefully not be too hard. So I spent 20 more minutes and did both.
Then I just kind of skimmed through the next 5 problems and found that 4 / maybe 5 of them were combo which somehow boosted my confidence. And they turned out not to be too hard so I got 7, 8, 9, and 11 in the next 30 minutes or so (I didn’t know how to p10 because all I could think of was a 16 * 8 * 3 dp skull)
So now I had 105 minutes left and did 10 problems, but I thought the ten I did were easy so I probably needed more if I wanted to get lucky and make jmo. I didn’t really spend a lot of time on p12 and p14 because geo. So I started trying to do p13.
Then I suddenly wanted to go to the bathroom but somehow thought that I had to submit early if I wanted to go so I held it for 30 minutes. Until I figured I should actually ask and turned out I could go without submitting early 💀 (and this submitting early rule probably only applied to my elementary school exams). Going to the bathroom earlier probably wouldn’t have made a difference though since I was trying to do p13 the entire time.
I kind of wanted to do more problems, but then thought a 236.5 would likely be enough to qualify for jmo, but that also meant I needed 0 sillies which is impossible. So I went to check my work and caught 4 sillies (p4 multiply by 1/3 instead of 3, p5 I did multiplication wrong, p9… don’t know what to say it’s just entirely wrong, and p11 I had 95 because I forgot about numbers that weren’t divisors of 24)
This was satisfying, but also extremely terrifying at the same time. This meant my aime score would’ve been like 4 points lower (at least I thought it would be 4 points lower). These 40 minutes of checking really made a big difference.
Then I proceeded to think about p10 since it’s the only combo problem left. Got it in about 10 minutes, and I immediately checked and caught a silly. Spent about 5 more minutes and found that I only had 10 minutes left so I couldn’t really do anything. Well, I checked my work but didn’t find any more sillies.
Reflection
so distribution was like
11111 11011 00000 (got p8 and p11 wrong)
For p8 I forgot that 55 existed so I wrote 800 😭 I wouldn’t count that as a silly but idk
For p11 I remembered that 8 was 0 the first time but then completely forgot that it was 0 when I was correcting it 💀
So my jmo index went from 246.5 to 226.5
Definitely not optimal, but considering that I didn’t even anticipate jmo, this was better than I thought. But perhaps qualifying or not wouldn’t matter that much either, since I’m bad at proofs and stuff –> will probably get like a 0 on jmo anyway and flagged a cheater
And I might’ve been cooked in F=ma, we don’t talk about that