It’s very crucial that you reflect on what you did right and what you can improve next time for every competition of any sort (olympiads, sports, etc.). I plan to do exactly that for the MAA 2021 Fall American Mathematics Competitions 10A, which I took on Wednesday, November 10th.
I took the test during the first block of my school day. Before coming into school, I decided that I would do a few computational exercises so that I wouldn’t be so tired and rusty when the contest began. It helped a little bit but not by much.
I came into the Media Center, sat down at a table, and started filling out the student contact information on the answer sheet. After a while, the testing booklets were passed out and we were given the signal to start at precisely 8:00 AM.
I opened up the booklet and looked at #11-20. It seemed doable and I saw a neat system of equations with an absolute value that I knew I could quickly beat with graphing.
The first two problems were trivial. However, when I got to the third and fourth problems, some sorts of computational errors made me have to skip.
I thought that #11 was a typical upstream/downstream word problem, except that I forgot this was on an AMC instead of a typical school math test. Also, I interpreted #12 in base 10 and didn’t even do any computations to verify that I was right. I ended up getting those two wrong. #14 was the one trivialized by graphing. #15 was a huge timesink but I still managed to get through. Personally, I should have observed cyclic quadrilaterals instead of repeatedly using area and 
#16 seemed tricky but it was knocked down by a flurry of plugging in integer and noninteger values of x. I got it wrong even though I had almost the right graph; I forgot to plot the point (0,-1) 😢
I had about twenty to thirty minutes after I finished the first fifteen or so. So I started cherry-picking and chose the easiest-looking ones to do: #18 and #20. #18 was a nice casework problem while #20 was surprisingly easy with some casework. I ended up checking #8 and changing it to (B), which ended up being the correct answer. Also, I solved #4 but put the wrong answer for #3 at the last moment. Time was up when I started working on #21.
In general, this 2021 Fall 10A was one of the hardest mocks that I have taken. I am grateful that I have practiced with AoPS Mock Contests in the month before because they present problems that are harder than the actual MAA contests. In total, I got four problems wrong: three because of computational errors and one because I got trolled by Emily with her boat.
AIME qualification is basically null for this contest. I must pot my hopes for the AMC 10B and get a good score in order to have a chance at the AIME.
Things That I Can Improve Next Time:
- Speed. I still need to work on speed, no matter how fast you think I am. On AoPS Mock Contests I typically get around fifteen to seventeen question answered without guessing, minus the one or two problems that I get wrong. I definitely had enough intuition to slap twenty or more questions on the test but since my speed is lacking, I need to solve problems more quickly.
- Accuracy. I also need to get accustomed to solving easier problems more accurately. Sure, this test was hard, but it was only hard because of the trap answers that MAA put on each question. I end up doing very bad computations along the way like 24+48 = 70 and other foolish things like that.
Surely if I improve on these two aspects, I will have a much higher chance for AIME and maybe even DHR/score over 120-130. That is still my goal, and I hope to at least approach it on the AMC 10B (November 16th) in a couple of days.