How to avoid making stupid careless mistakes

[osprey099]

I've been doing AAMC Fls for about 2 weeks now and initially, I got a 35 on AAMC 3 but have only gotten 30-32 on AAMCs 4-7. During my review of these, I have noticed that I've been missing around 5 questions per BS and PS section due to really dumb careless mistakes. For instance, on AAMC 7, I accidentally read pKa instead of Ka, which ultimately got me the question wrong. It's things like this that make me so mad at myself because when I'm taking it, I actually am concentrating really hard but my brain just somehow misses things like these. Does anyone who's been experiencing these sorts of problems know how I can improve? I feel like without careless errors, I can get 34-36 whereas right now, I'm getting 30-32s.

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[Tenebrus]

I feel the same way as you, and did the thing with the Ka! I'd love some tips too, but if what is being said about there being more calculation type questions/harder questions in general, its possible that this will be less of an issue on the actual MCAT since I think harder questions will focus less on tricking us up...

Anyone have any advice?

 

[dropper]

This would happen to me a lot when reading the questions insanely fast and finishing sections with 10+ minutes to spare.

It may sound pretty dumb, but what I try to do now (and this only adds a few seconds per question), is read the question like I was a pre-schooler.

"The"...."genetics"...."of"....."coat"....."color"...."in"...."albino"....."hamsters".....with slight pauses between the words. To be honest I don't do this for every single word, instead I zoom through the stupid filler words, "the, of, an, if" and slow down for the really important key words "three contiguous bases"..."single strand"...etc.

This has noticeably reduced the amount of careless errors I make due to incorrectly reading a question.

 

[deleted103644]

Rtfq

 

[PanRoasted]

I think one thing that helps me reduce the number of careless errors I make is to make sure I spend a MINIMUM of like 30 seconds on a question. The ones where you make careless, stupid mistakes are always the ones you spend like 10 seconds looking at, do a simple calculation, check the answer box and never look back. If it took you 10 seconds to do, you can probably afford to spend the next 10 seconds carefully re-reading the question prompt to make sure you took everything you needed to take into account. That's my take on the issue.

 

[deleted103644]

I think one thing that helps me reduce the number of careless errors I make is to make sure I spend a MINIMUM of like 30 seconds on a question. The ones where you make careless, stupid mistakes are always the ones you spend like 10 seconds looking at, do a simple calculation, check the answer box and never look back. If it took you 10 seconds to do, you can probably afford to spend the next 10 seconds carefully re-reading the question prompt to make sure you took everything you needed to take into account. That's my take on the issue.

In other words, RTFQ.

In case that acronym escapes you, "Read The ****ing Question".

 

[PanRoasted]

In other words, RTFQ.

In case that acronym escapes you, "Read The ****ing Question".

Gosh, you sure saved a lot of time using that acronym.

 

[Tenebrus]

Rtfq

What amazing advice! I hadn't even thought of that!

 

[lemons22]

In other words, RTFQ.

In case that acronym escapes you, "Read The ****ing Question".

Genius!

 

[deleted103644]

What amazing advice! I hadn't even thought of that!

Hey, that alone pretty much got me to 40+, so don't knock it.

You'd be surprised how often your mistakes are due to skipping a vital piece of info.

So yes, it's obvious, but RTFQ.

 

[thelullaby99]

Hey, that alone pretty much got me to 40+, so don't knock it.

You'd be surprised how often your mistakes are due to skipping a vital piece of info.

So yes, it's obvious, but RTFQ.

I agree with this advice. So many times I did not realize that I have been skipping an IMPORTANT piece of info. My eyes would be reading the question, or so I thought, but my brain will unconsciously try to speed read the whole thing. Trust me, I have always been proud of myself as a speed reader but this causes problems when dealing with wordy questions.

One glaring example will be when the question was asking about 'nonzero' stuff. SOMEHOW my brain has interpreted it as 'zero', and you bet my answer was the opposite of what was asked. So, read every single word of the question stem. Takes time, but worth it.

 

[JLeBling]

RTFQ before and after... at least that is what I'm going to try to do from now on.
Keeping the scratch paper neat and organized (I'm getting better at this)

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?page=mistakes

 

[Gauss44]

What I did: After answering questions, I would add any silly mistakes to a list. A couple times a week I would scan that list for patterns.

I kept missing "not", double negatives (esp. roman numerals), misreading questions, and skipping words. So, on my next set of questions, I kept that in mind. It really helped.

 

[Squish miss]

how do you avoid making silly mistakes, like ph 4 has more hydornium ion concentrations. i know its more but i got tripped up when i had to read a graph?;/