How can i stop making carless mistakes in math?

Question

I am going to tenth grade next school year. During this time, I will be taking AP Calculus I and part of Calculus 2. Typically in math, I have no problem understanding the concepts yet my grade suffers greatly from careless mistakes. During Honors Alg 2/Trig I received a B and B because of these mistakes. Seeing as how Calculus is even more algebraically intensive, this will be a greater problem. I have tried checking my work, talking myself through problems but nothing works. Advice?

Answer 1

I'm surprised that checking your work doesn't help.  That works for me.  Here are some other things that come to mind:

-Always make sure your solutions make sense.  

-Checking your work in a different way than you did it (using a different method, or working backwards where possible), or checking it after some time has gone by (e.g at the end of an assignment) may help you not to just automatically make the same mistakes when you check.  

-Try to see whether there is a pattern in your errors, so you can check specifically for your common errors, should help.  

-Slowing down may help.  

-If you are making mistakes with particular operations or math facts, practicing them on their own may help.

Answer 2

Some people are just prone to making stupid mistakes. . . in the real world, that's when you get good at asking colleagues to take a quick look over your work to make sure you didn't totally s***w up.  Some of the best people at getting the math concepts can be the sloppiest people at actually applying it all correctly.

Always try to see if your answer makes any sense at the end.  That's sometimes hard to do with just straight math problems, though.  If you can, work the same problem all over again and hide the sheet you worked on the first time through.  That should work better than just checking over your work, as it's really easy to go "okay, that looks about right" if you're just looking at what you already did.  Perhaps try working through your answer backwards and see if you get the initial problem back. . . take the derivative of something you just integrated, perhaps.  (That also keeps those skills sharp as a bonus.)