Number Cruncher Help

[carrie]

Do you have any suggestions on improving number cruncher time? I take about 15-16 minutes(forever, I know) and usually get 3 wrong. My scores are a little over 200 right now. I use a TI 84. I've heard that a lot of people prefer and are faster with RPN calculators, but I don't own one nor do I have the time before district to learn how to use it really well. Is there anything that I can do to improve my number cruncher time?

[88bobcat]

Some of the number cruncher problems have short-cuts. Some are based upon Trigonometric identities, some are based upon polynomial identities, and some are based upon Taylor/McLaurin expansion polynomials. If you can recognize these, you can save some punch-in time. For example,


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There are other "short-cut" punch-ins; but, again, you may not have time to learn all the identities necessary to recognize them quickly between now and district. Also, many of those types of punch-ins are based in Algebra II or "higher" courses. If you're not a junior or senior, or if you haven't studied the subjects independently, you might not have enough of a math foundation to rapidly recognize all of them.

Other than that, I can only recommend that you practice a HUGE amount of punch-ins between now and district. I would suggest at least 100 each day, if not more.


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[austorior]

which calculator you use doesn't really matter THAT much.
I use a Hp-33 which is a RPN calculator, i average 8-9 min punch in. But my friend uses Ti84, and he gets about the same time as me, maybe 2 seconds off?

Crunchers are pure practice makes perfect problems. You should do as many as you can whenever you can. missing 3 is actually not bad.

Like bobcat said above there are shortcuts, but mainly for the last page ones, so it shouldn't make that much a difference, in my opinion at least.

The goal is finishing all punch ins in less than 10 min, missing 3 or less.

[sinkokuyou]

for those of u who likes to do punch-ins first, it's too bad if u got more than 3 wrong and didn't finish in 9mins... because what's the point of doing all of it first if u can't even get any advantage from it. And I do believe that doing the punch-ins first and doing the test in it's sequence don't make that much difference... I hope I can prove that to u guys at TState... :]
and btw, if u miss more than 2 on it, u'll miss 14 points... and if u miss more than 7, u can't even get 300+... and the bad thing is that there are PLENTY of free questions(points) like this punch-ins, so everyone CAN score high... well, personally, I think the punch-ins are just some question to waste ur time, so do them as fast as possible.
and don't mind me saying this but, I think for Num/Math/Calc, 60+% of the test, it's stupid...

[carrie]

Thanks. I've already improved to about 14 minutes now and a little better accuracy. That 1-2 minutes should really make a difference in my score. And I still have a week to before district to practice too. Are there any shortcuts for the types of number crunchers that are usually number 61(e with square & cube roots) and 65(arctan and ln)? Those two problems just take a while and it seems like I might be missing something.

[austorior]

you will eventually learn most of those identities/simplifications in your classes (usually in precalculus).
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search trigonometry identities on google or whatever and a lot of those are helpful for not only calculator punch ins but also general math test.