Written on Thursday. Took the f=ma exam. Didn’t really go well. TL;DR predicting 13 + guesses, so maybe 14 or 15 if I’m really lucky. If I qualify, it’ll be borderline.
Last year I complained about the test being out-of-order. Well this year AAPT took it to the extreme and completely randomized the order. My #1 was the same as some of my friends’ #25. I think the answer choices were randomized too.
Also, one of my friends told me that “being able to read multiple questions is nice” on paper AMC. Well, turns out, not being able to read multiple questions at once is really not nice. The cost of reading more questions is higher than just looking an inch down, and so I really just tried to take the test sequentially with a decision of “go for problem / skip”. I also expected later problems to be harder somewhat, which turned out to be entirely not true.
Anyway both of these issues tilted me as I basically went sequentially through the test and got timeblocked by the annoying hard bashy problems. As a result I basically didn’t get past the first 18 problems and probably missed a few easier problems and spent too much time on the hard problems. And not being able to look ahead meant I was less likely to skip a problem.
To be honest I should also attribute some of this to skill issuing (plus test pressure as I usually skill issue hard on olympiads). But the test really tilted me more than usual.
One more thing. All the problems this year were so long. Like I don’t want to read 3 paragraphs for a physics problem :sob:. Oh and sometimes i had to bubble stuff twice before it would register :skull:
Anyway I might not qualify this year. It’d be kinda funny (and kinda embarassing), everyone was expecting me to qualify. It’d be funnier (and tragic) if I didn’t do well on any of my olys this year…
