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Speed Up Hole Punching


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Keep practicing under timed conditions (maybe even limit yourself to 5 seconds less than the optimal time). Another thing to do is instead of drawing a grid, just draw directly on the practice question's hole punched paper diagram and visualize unfolding and refolding in your head. I found that you don't always need to draw out a grid for all questions. I think I only used the grid method for a handful of the questions on the DAT.

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20 minutes ago, garlerey said:

Keep practicing under timed conditions (maybe even limit yourself to 5 seconds less than the optimal time). Another thing to do is instead of drawing a grid, just draw directly on the practice question's hole punched paper diagram and visualize unfolding and refolding in your head. I found that you don't always need to draw out a grid for all questions. I think I only used the grid method for a handful of the questions on the DAT.

^ exactly that. It just takes some practice, but you will start to save a lot of time.

Also, for hard-looking questions, try to rule out answers using the 'symmetry from first fold' method, where if the answer choices don't show symmetry along where the first fold is, it's wrong. Occasionally, this allows you to rule out 4 choices and solve the question in 5–10 seconds or so.

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1 hour ago, PimentRouge said:

^ exactly that. It just takes some practice, but you will start to save a lot of time.

Also, for hard-looking questions, try to rule out answers using the 'symmetry from first fold' method, where if the answer choices don't show symmetry along where the first fold is, it's wrong. Occasionally, this allows you to rule out 4 choices and solve the question in 5–10 seconds or so.

Awesome! Thanks for the insight. What is the "symmetry from first fold" method? I've always worked backwards from the last fold

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4 hours ago, westcoastbestcoast said:

Awesome! Thanks for the insight. What is the "symmetry from first fold" method? I've always worked backwards from the last fold

Idk what video I took this screenshot from, but look at this question: https://imgur.com/CNWU1IM

It's a fairly simple example, and I would agree that working backwards would be the best method for this and most other examples.

But the concept is that the answer has to have symmetry along the the last 'unfold' (i.e. the diagonal line of symmetry from Fold 1). So you can eliminate A, B, C, and E without having to actually visualize unfolding 3 times. OCCASIONALLY useful in challenging questions that can easily be solved by this method.

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On 6/7/2018 at 8:28 PM, PimentRouge said:

Idk what video I took this screenshot from, but look at this question: https://imgur.com/CNWU1IM

It's a fairly simple example, and I would agree that working backwards would be the best method for this and most other examples.

But the concept is that the answer has to have symmetry along the the last 'unfold' (i.e. the diagonal line of symmetry from Fold 1). So you can eliminate A, B, C, and E without having to actually visualize unfolding 3 times. OCCASIONALLY useful in challenging questions that can easily be solved by this method.

 

That's actually pretty clever, never really thought of that.

More importantly @westcoastbestcoast why would you bother drawing grids when you are allowed to write directly on the paper on the Canadian DAT? Just print the PAT questions and practice on paper by drawing directly on the question, it saves you significant time.

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1 hour ago, Starburst said:

That's actually pretty clever, never really thought of that.

More importantly @westcoastbestcoast why would you bother drawing grids when you are allowed to write directly on the paper on the Canadian DAT? Just print the PAT questions and practice on paper by drawing directly on the question, it saves you significant time.

haha yeah, so far i've been looking off my computer screen to get the gist of the techniques but will definitely print them up and practise!

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