Why ten questions analysed deeply beat a hundred rushed — and how to bank your triggers.
Most students spam practice questions and plateau. The ineffective loop is: complete a hundred questions, glance at the score, move on. The effective loop is: complete ten, deeply analyse why each wrong answer went wrong, name the specific mistake pattern, then do targeted practice on that one skill.
For each section, find the single skill holding you back and work on that — not everything at once. One weakness fixed properly, then the next. Focused practice creates reliable, measurable improvement; unfocused practice mostly rehearses your bad habits.
Keep an error log of every question you get wrong: what type of question it was, what you actually did wrong, what the pattern is, and how you will catch it next time. Over a few weeks the patterns become unmistakable — these are your triggers, the situations that reliably produce your mistakes.
Typical triggers: in VR, getting turned around by double negatives; in DM, concluding from an assumption instead of concrete evidence; in QR, reaching for the calculator before planning the solution. Once a trigger is named, you can feel it happening in the exam and catch yourself mid-mistake.
Your goal is not to get every question right. It is to be fast and accurate on the questions you can get right, and to guess strategically on the rest. That trade — protecting your strong marks instead of bleeding time into your weakest questions — is a large part of what separates a 700 scorer from an 800 scorer.