I keep making bad grades on my Mathematics tests. Why?

I assume the teacher returned the graded test, and you can see where you made your mistakes.
Perhaps you were over-confident, and didn’t give each question enough thought.
Perhaps you misunderstand part of the mathematics (add first, then multiply).
Re-examine the test to find your answers.

Is it possible the teacher graded the problems incorrectly? Stranger things have happened. Or, perhaps you performed the mathematics correctly but you erred in other ways such as showing steps or formatting? Forgot to write your name on the paper?

Take the test again on your own. If you can do all of the problems then it was probably some performance anxiety and i wouldn’t worry about it too much. If you miss questions again there is probably some concept you are missing.

I have tutored several people in math and in my experience it is typically rushing through the steps that causes problems. Slow down, write as neatly as possible, check and double check the calculations, and make sure you haven’t missed any steps along the way. My son is at exactly this place in his math studies and proportions can get tricky, if you miss or make a mistake on any step, it carries all the way through to the answer.

Typically math teachers will take the time to point out where your answer started to go south. If the teacher didn’t go ahead and review them yourself to see if there is a pattern to the errors.

Good luck!

A common cause is not reading the question properly. I get to test the mathematical ability of nurses quite often and what you see is people misreading the question and actually answering something else (often correctly). As @SuperMouse says this is often due to rushing too quickly to the answering stage with out fully understanding the question due a perceived lack of time.

Good answers so far. A friend of mine asked me several months ago to help her with her daughters math tests, she knows I am a math person. She could not understand why her daughter did well on math assignments and had a lot of trouble on the tests. Every answer she got wrong was because she did not read the problem well. If her homework assignments say list these series of number lowest to highest she always did them perfectly, but then her test asked list them highest to lowest, and she chose the answer that was like her homework, lowestto highest. Her mom thought she was not ale to do it in the reverse or order, but that was not the case it all, it was simply her daughter made an assumption about the directions, rather than reading them. She did this over and over again on different types of problems. Look over your test and see if that is what you possibly have been doing. It is extremely important on tests to read questions word for word, you can not speed through it. Some people can read in blocks, they are very fast readers, which is great, but they fill in words without actually reading all the words.

Is the test multiple choice? Or, show your work?

It would be helpful to us to see an example of a problem that you got wrong.

For problems involving solving algebraic equations, it is a good habit to plug in the answer that you got for the variable and make sure that it solves the equation.

Exactly, plug in the answer, check your answer. Whenever I subtract, I add my answer back to make sure it is correct. I do this with every thing in math, double check my answer.

Read your directions slowly, carefully, and more than once. Check your work. When you are done, reread and recheck. Take all the time allowed, if needed, to triple check everything.