APSMO common mistakes on olympiad-style papers
Avoid APSMO traps: figure assumptions, skipped conditions, overcounting, and spending too long on one late item.
Fixing APSMO common mistakes starts by naming the failure mode. “Careless” is not a plan.
- Trusting a sketch that was not to scale.
- Skipping a constraint in the last line of the stem.
- Overcounting cases when order does not matter.
- Protecting one late item that costs two middle marks.
Quote the clue you missed, write a one-line rule, then re-attempt without the answer key.