Addressing a Common Pitfall of Fast-Paced Competitive Math: Improving Speed and Accuracy by 200%
In the Fall 2021 AMC 10 and Spring 2022 AMC 8 exams, Random Math co-founders and coaches Manish and Stuti discovered a common pitfall among students who weren’t able to reach their full potential: Students fell short on time constraints, despite being able to solve more problems after the competition.
Even among students who reached their goals — a large majority, in fact, as 86% of all 125 students who took the AMC exams at Random Math qualified for the AIME that year — there was still a need for the development of speed and accuracy in computation.
To improve speed while maintaining accuracy and help students discover their best method for time management in fast-paced math competitions like the AMC 8 and AMC 10/12, Random Math established a new course, RMXplore Flash.
The course focuses on enhancing number sense as part of Random Math’s specialized math training program, Math Bytes. RMXplore Flash is designed for students in grades 2 through 8 and aims to increase both speed and accuracy in math computations by an average of 200%. Some students lack speed but make up for it in accuracy; others lack accuracy but have speed. Random Math’s RMXplore Flash course addresses both types of issues.
The course includes over 100 quizzes in categorized and mixed topics such as basic and advanced operations, sequences and series, and other key computational skills commonly applied to competition-style math problems. Each quiz features 50 problems and answers.
A lack of speed in computing simple math operations can either result from a lack of practice or poor number sense: Students who improve their speed and accuracy in solving problems through adequate training and practice have stronger mathematical intuition in approaching all kinds of math problems, including ones focusing on logical reasoning and dedication, counting and probability, and other traditional topics such as algebra, number theory, and geometry.
Compared to students with strong number sense, those without the necessary problem-solving intuition may find frequent roadblocks in the problem-solving process and cannot solve problems as smoothly and quickly as others with strong math intuition. When both groups of students take the same competition, the results are as clearly indicative of their mathematical proficiency as they can be.
