AMC 12 scoring strategy — is it worth attempting harder problems or stick to 15 and move on?
Competed in AMC 12 for the third time this year and finally broke the AIME cutoff with a 96. The scoring penalty system completely changes optimal strategy — getting 15 questions right with no wrong answers beats attempting 20 and missing 5 of them. Took me two years of competing to actually internalize that and adjust my pacing and risk decisions during the exam itself.
Problems 1–10 should be autopilot for anyone seriously prepping. If you're spending more than 3 minutes on any of those, your fundamentals need work before worrying about strategy. The real decision point is at problems 16–20 where the difficulty jumps hard. I now make a deliberate choice at problem 16: look at it for 30 seconds, decide if I can solve it confidently within 5 minutes, and skip if I can't commit to that honestly.
My prep this cycle was about 90 minutes daily for 5 months, working primarily through past AMC 12 problems from 2010–2024. Number theory and combinatorics are where I was weakest — ended up doing focused proof-writing work to get comfortable with those problem types. Mock exams under real time pressure are irreplaceable; the psychological element of the clock matters more than most people acknowledge going into it.
What was your raw score breakdown? I'm curious how many you attempted versus got right. I'm sitting around 84–88 on mocks and not sure whether I should be attempting more problems or locking in what I already know.
Combinatorics is always my weak spot too. Working through Art of Problem Solving combinatorics specifically helped me more than general AMC prep — the problem types get very targeted in a way that translates directly to competition format.
Five months at 90 minutes is serious volume. Did you work through solutions immediately after attempting each problem or did you batch your review sessions? I'm trying to figure out which approach builds pattern recognition faster.
The penalty scoring strategy shift is the biggest mental adjustment. I spent my first two AMC 12 attempts trying to maximize the number of problems I touched and it actively hurt my score. Conservative and confident beats ambitious and sloppy every time.