My experience of UKMT in Grade 10

Backgrounds

UKMT is the initial of United Kingdom Mathematics Trust, which is a Mathematic Contest aimed at encouraging students to practice and analyze Mathematics. 30 multiple choices are needed to be answered in UKMT.

My reasons to attend it and feelings

I am keen on learning Mathematics and doing well in analyzing and tackling practical problems in terms of Mathematics. When I heard of UKMT, I reckoned that it was a good opportunity for me to strengthen my fundamental mathematic skills in order to learn better in the future for further Mathematics. In addition to show my abilities in Mathematic field, I also wanted to learn about the style of Mathematic questions in countries except China. Tell you the truth, I have never done such kinds of questions since I was getting used to finish questions from China. Thanks to UKMT and my efforts, I got to know structures of exams in other countries.

I also found an interesting point through my experience of UKMT: Unlike exams in China, a student would lose points if he writes wrong answer in multiple choices in many foreign Mathematic exams. That means he couldn’t guess answers.

My preparation of UKMT and the final result

In order to achieved my goal of getting gold certificate, I previewed past papers and chose papers from 2015 to 2019 to practice, which was a process that quite brought benefits to me. I learned not only some specific ways to solve problems, but also the quality of being diligent. I wanted to give up from time to time when I prepared it. However, I insisted in completing it since it was my first time to contact foreign Mathematics questions (I really would like to achieve something in this field like characteristics of analyzing or certificates of contests, so I spent one hour doing related questions during that period)

I finally achieved gold certificate. (I got 103 out of 125, while the requirement for gold certificate was getting 86 points.)
However, I did some mistakes because I was daydreaming at that time, I wish I could do it in 2021 and get higher scores (maybe 120, nearly full marks)