I’ve been making consistent careless mistakes in quant quizzes or questions for the past 2-3 months. For example, I suspect that I’ve made at least one careless mistake for ~90% of all quizzes.
Here are some non-exhaustive examples of careless mistakes:
- Making arithmetic errors (probably the most), e.g., 8+6=13
- Making other dumb non-arithmetic errors, e.g., seeing < as >
- Glancing past important information in the question, e.g., not reading that the question is asking for seconds and not minutes
- Forgetting an important information in the question, e.g., forgetting x is non-negative
- Misreading an important information in the question, e.g., reading 100 as 1,000
And I’ve been doing mostly untimed questions for the past 2-3 months, so it’s ironic (as well as frustrating) that I’m still making so many careless mistakes. I might be a bit nervous or unfocused, but I don’t think I have ADHD or neurodivergent.
What did I try to do? I put a written reminder in my line sight on my laptop that says “go slow” and “read slowly”, but I got tunnel vision and forgot about the reminder.
What else can I do? Here are some of my ideas:
- Use a metronome to read one word per beat, or write letter/number per beat
- Like, really imagining clicking the 50% speed button on a video
- Meditate for a minute before doing practice
- Point finger on question
My question to the audience:
1. Do you have more ideas I can try?
2. Maybe I’m wrong about being neurodivergent? Maybe you think my careless mistake rate is actually abnormal, and I should seek out accommodations?
I think this important to get right because accuracy > speed at this stage.