Calculation Errors

[enjkm]

Hello,

It's been about 3 weeks since I started studying for the GMAT and I can't seem to break away from continuously making careless calculation/arithmetic errors - even when I'm writing everything down. I've made a wide range of errors - from subtracting when I was supposed to add, to adding the wrong places of digits together. I thought time and practice was going to solve this problem, but so far I haven't made a significant progress. And I'm starting to get a little nervous, since in my mind, 3 weeks should have been enough time for me to get back into the habit of doing math problems again.

It makes me sound really old, but I haven't done any kind of serious math for about 10 years. But when I was in school, math used to be one of my stronger subjects. So I must really have lost it during the 10 years that I've been away from school. Any suggestions as to what I can do to catch myself from making these careless calculation errors?

[ps63739]

I am not sure if work for you, but I found a lot of improvement when I tried this. This is what I did, if you find it reasonable you can try the same.

I stopped using pen and paper, started doing mental maths a lot. I was taking my time and trying to calculate, simultaneously, thinking was I wrong and confirming it again and again. And I was using pen paper if those were really needed. Even for ratio proportion and geometry questions. It was time consuming in the begining, but showed a significant improvement in 10 days.