Some possible reasons behind the silly mistakes that you are making include:
- Problem with preparations
- Problem with time management
- Problem with concentration
Problem with preparations:
The fact that you have never struggled with the content very much indicates that understanding the content has never really been a problem for you. This suggests that there is a chance that your preparations are insufficient and/or ineffective. Good preparation for maths exams involves completing various practice materials (such as past exam papers and textbook questions), so that you can maximise your ability to apply your understanding of the content to a range of exam questions. Based on this, you should consider whether a possible lack of sufficient and/or effective preparations may have been (and seemingly continues) to be the reason behind silly mistakes.
Problem with time management:
Effective time management is important and is necessary for all subjects. Doing so allows you to allocate a reasonable amount of time to particular questions/sections and complete those within that specific time limit. Typically, effective time management also enables you to go through your working and answers towards the end of an exam and ensure that you have not made unwanted silly mistakes in any question. Ineffective time management can therefore increase the chance of silly mistakes occurring (consequently impacting your overall performance) because of resulting stress, even if you are well prepared for the exam. Because of this, it is important to divide allocated time efficiently, so that you have enough time to answer questions (therefore minimising stress) and, if possible, check your answers towards the end of the exam.
Problem with concentration:
Losing a bit of focus at some point during an exam can be problematic because this is precisely when silly mistakes have the highest chance of occurring. For example, when I was in year 10, I recall accidentally circling an incorrect answer to a multiple choice question involving the quadratic formula despite knowing the correct answer. As you can see, not being fully concentrated at any point in an exam is not uncommon. Here, stress should also be considered given that it can impact how well we are focusing on an exam. As a result, an answer/working that might appear correct to you may in fact contain a slight error that you might have missed because you may not have been fully concentrated on a particular question when you were attempting it (the cause of which can be stress).
I hope this helps!
