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e are many common math mistakes that I have noticed many students making. They are simple issues that are often overlooked, missed, or forgotten. For some of them, no matter how many times you mention them to a student, they seem to continue to be missed, usually out of bad habit. As a tutor, it is my job to continue to enforce correcting these mistakes through repetition. As a student, here are some of the most common mistakes that you may be able to look over, remember, and not make them in the future.
1. Overlooking or adding too many parentheses: parentheses are very important when solving any type of equation. They are, of course, part of our order of operations. Some students forget when to evaluate parentheses, don’t register their existence, or put too many in an equation when solving by steps, causing incorrect answers. For an equation such as 8=4(x+3), I have noticed some students attempt to put the parenthesis around the x, giving them 8=4(x)+(3), which would give the wrong answer.
2. Negatives: some students often make the mistake of not distributing a negative or forgetting that subtracting a negative number is actually just adding a number. For
5-(4+3), the negative can be distributed into the parenthesis giving 5-4-3. This is often rewritten by students as 5-4+3, in which they forget about the parenthesis and distribution.
3. Writing an equation incorrectly: some students like to rewrite equations on a separate piece of paper, and while there is nothing wrong with this, some students do not write it correctly and therefore result in an incorrect answer. Writing a fraction, such as x/2, as 2/x when rewriting would not be correct, because in the original expression, the x is in the numerator, .
4. Remembering formulas: when a teacher gives you formulas, they are important, use them! Some students ask for help over something they can’t solve, because they haven’t glanced down at the formula sheet that their teacher provided them. The problems aren’t solvable without them! Make sure to take a good look at your formula sheet, especially if one won’t be given to you on your test.
5. Not writing down all steps: Many very intelligent students are fully capable of solving equations in their head and just writing down the answer. A lot of times this is effective, but no matter how good the mathematician, they will most likely make mistakes if trying to solve equations all in their head. It is important to write down all steps when answering questions, first to be able to solve it mistake free, and second, in the event that a mistake was made or the correct answer was not found, to be able to look back at work to find the mistake. If you do the whole problem in your head and end up with the wrong answer, you won’t have any idea where the mistake was made.