How NOT to prepare for the TMUA (exhaustive)

Catch yourself doing these and avoid at all costs. Most people do several of them.

1. Doing past paper after past paper without actually studying anything and just calling it a day.
2. Reading the mark scheme, nodding, and moving on to next; literally highway to hell I can't stress this enough.
3. Buying a course or hiring private tutors that repackages free papers with worse explanations and just shows how good they are at maths.
4. Memorising "tricks" for question types instead of learning the underlying decision.
5. Cramming A-level content you already know because it feels productive.
6. Watching YouTube walkthroughs as a substitute for actually solving problems.
7. Spreading prep over six months at one paper a month. Momentum is key.
8. Drilling Paper 1 and ignoring Paper 2 because it feels alien.
9. Treating wrong answers as bad luck instead of evidence, because it is not.
10. Doing STEP and MAT instead of TMUA papers because they feel harder and therefore "better". Do the things that matters first and foremost.