Are you afraid of math exams? Of course it is, who wouldn’t be? I’ll tell you something: I’m an engineer, I have a PhD in what is basically applied mathematics, and I’ve done a lot of math in my life.
However, if I were to do high school admissions now, I would also dread the math test.
Why, when I surely know it all? Because it’s easy to make a mistake under pressure. And you will be under pressure. Only a fool would have no respect for an exam that partly decides your future. In such stressful situations, it’s not about what you know. It’s about how much of it you can use at any given moment – and that makes a big difference.
Someone who has learned a lot, but panics easily, will almost certainly do worse in exams (and in life as well) than someone who knows less, but reliably.
In mathematics, as in many other fields, it makes sense to learn very thoroughly a few basic skills and develop a few habits. They won’t guarantee you’ll finish first, but they’ll almost certainly guarantee you’ll pass acceptably. And that’s mostly what it’s all about.
How to apply this general truth to high school entrance exams in mathematics? They are currently taking place in the Czech Republic and will soon be in Slovakia as well.
To find out, we went through their assignments from previous years published on the website of Cermat, the Czech Center for Assessing Education Results. We derived some simple advice from them.
1. Read the assignment carefully
In a hurry, one tends to skip and read as quickly as possible. So this is a very bad idea! Force yourself to slowly read everything that goes into the assignment. Very often it is the details that matter.
For example, there are often problems in which you have to choose one of the numerical solutions – only when you count them, you find that none of them fits. What has happened? You missed a seemingly unimportant line in the assignment: “The result is rounded to whole numbers.”
2. Write down the intermediate results
It doesn’t pay to be lazy in mathematics
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