AMC 10 Overview & Scoring Strategy
The exam
- 25 multiple-choice problems (A–E), 75 minutes, no calculator.
- Scoring: 6 points per correct answer, 1.5 points per blank, 0 per wrong answer. Maximum 150.
- Two versions each November (10A and 10B, about a week apart); you may take both and the better score counts for AIME qualification.
- Problems are roughly ordered by difficulty. Problems 1–10 are routine, 11–15 need an idea, 16–20 decide most students' scores, 21–25 are hard.
The qualifying line
AIME qualification goes to roughly the top 2.5% of scorers, and the cutoff moves with the difficulty of the paper:
| Year | 10A cutoff | 10B cutoff |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 111 | 108 |
| 2019 | 103.5 | 108 |
| 2020 | 103.5 | 102 |
| 2021 (Feb) | 103.5 | 102 |
| 2021 (Nov) | 96 | 96 |
| 2022 | 93 | 94.5 |
| 2023 | 103.5 | 105 |
| 2024 | 103.5 | 105 |
Cutoffs above are as published by the MAA each year; check the current year's on maa.org. Plan for 105. The most reliable way to get there is not to solve hard problems; it is to make zero errors on the ones you can solve.
Score arithmetic every student should know
| Correct | Blank | Wrong | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 10 | 0 | 105 |
| 16 | 8 | 1 | 108 |
| 17 | 6 | 2 | 111 |
| 17 | 3 | 5 | 106.5 |
| 18 | 2 | 5 | 111 |
| 20 | 0 | 5 | 120 |
Read the first row again: 15 correct and 10 blank qualifies. Fifteen correct is problems 1–15 with no mistakes. Every wrong answer costs you the 1.5 points a blank would have earned, so a wrong answer is a 1.5-point penalty relative to skipping.
Guess or leave blank?
A random guess among 5 choices has expected value points, less than the 1.5 for a blank. Guess only when you can eliminate choices:
| Choices remaining | Expected value of guessing |
|---|---|
| 5 | 1.2 (worse than blank) |
| 4 | 1.5 (break-even) |
| 3 | 2.0 |
| 2 | 3.0 |
Rule: guess if you have eliminated at least two choices; otherwise leave it blank. On the last few problems, a good partial solution often eliminates two or three choices (parity, size, divisibility, units), which makes guessing correct.
Time budget
| Problems | Target time | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 | 15 min | 15 |
| 11–15 | 15 min | 30 |
| 16–20 | 25 min | 55 |
| 21–25 and review | 20 min | 75 |
Two rules that protect the score:
- Never spend more than 4 minutes stuck on one problem before problem 20. Mark it, move on, return with fresh eyes.
- Reserve the last 5 minutes to re-read problems 1–10. Careless errors there are the most expensive mistakes on the exam: each one costs 7.5 points relative to a blank, more than any hard problem is worth to you.
What separates 90 from 105
Students stuck around 90 usually have all the knowledge they need. The gap is:
- 2–3 careless errors in problems 1–12 (misread the question, arithmetic slip, answered the wrong quantity).
- Attempting 21–25 with ten minutes left and getting nothing, instead of spending that time checking.
- Weak spots in two or three specific topics that show up every year in problems 13–19 (counting with restrictions, circle geometry, modular arithmetic, and similar triangles are the usual suspects).
The rest of this guide is built around fixing exactly those three things.