Banish careless mistakes (1 Viewer)

[DarkOperator618]

good on u2 for hanging in there with x1 kids

while our 3u kids arent even trying in 2u

helps our rank tbf

 

[CM_Tutor]

One piece of advice:

Look at your answer and stop for a moment to reflect on "Is my answer REASONABLE?"

Not "Is my answer CORRECT", as that is often a difficult question to answer, but is it reasonable... a lot of silly mistakes can be caught by recognising that an answer is not reasonable.

For example, find the third side of a triangle given the other two sides and an angle. Using the cosine rule, if you have sides of 5 and 9 and find the third side is 52, that is UNreasonable. The answer must be between 4 and 14 or you can't get a triangle. The likely mistake is having answered with rather than (i.e. forgetting the square in the cosine rule and so not square rooting to get the answer). As a tutor and a marker, I can say with certainty that many mistakes are made that lead to obviously unreasonable / impossible, or sometimes even just very implausible, answers... and this is true in the sciences as well as in Maths.