Olympiad Maths Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 193 of 260 #193 of 2000

Problem 193

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.7 Find the answer

Mary told John her score on the American High School Mathematics Examination (AHSME), which was over 8080. From this, John was able to determine the number of problems Mary solved correctly. If Mary's score had been any lower, but still over 8080, John could not have determined this. What was Mary's score? (Recall that the AHSME consists of 3030 multiple choice problems and that one's score, ss, is computed by the formula s=30+4cws=30+4c-w, where cc is the number of correct answers and ww is the number of wrong answers. (Students are not penalized for problems left unanswered.)

Official solution

Let Mary's score, number correct, and number wrong be s,c,ws,c,w respectively. Then
\begin{align*} s&=30+4c-w \\ &=30+4(c-1)-(w-4) \\ &=30+4(c+1)-(w+4). \end{align*}
Therefore, Mary could not have left at least five blank; otherwise, one more correct and four more wrong would produce the same score. Similarly, Mary could not have answered at least four wrong (clearly Mary answered at least one right to have a score above 8080, or even 3030.)
It follows that c+w26c+w\geq 26 and w3w\leq 3, so c23c\geq 23 and s=30+4cw30+4(23)3=119s=30+4c-w\geq 30+4(23)-3=119. So Mary scored at least 119119. To see that no result other than 2323 right/33 wrong produces 119119, note that s=1194cw=89s=119\Rightarrow 4c-w=89 so w3(mod4)w\equiv 3\pmod{4}. But if w=3w=3, then c=23c=23, which was the result given; otherwise w7w\geq 7 and c24c\geq 24, but this implies at least 3131 questions, a contradiction. This makes the minimum score 119\boxed{119}.

Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic, difficulty and ordering added by this site.