Thanks for all the input. It's given me some good questions to ask her and to ask my DH, who's the one who has looked at her homework. He confirms that she always sets the problems up correctly and can talk about her reasoning, and it's almost always sound. He says she just makes calculation errors in the middle of problems and then works the remainder of the problems with faulty numbers. This seems in line with what her teacher says and with what DD says about getting distracted. So I think that she really needs to work on focusing and checking her work. We talked about it and she says she thinks this might help.
She did have a very dry teacher last year who was super-particular about non-math things like where to place problems on the page and other things that were really just jumping through hoops.
As far as assessing whether she learned the concepts last year in Algebra 2, she took a standardized assessment that included Algebra 2 and even some calculus and she got a 99%Ile score.
She has a test tomorrow and we've talked about taking her time and checking her work. I will talk with her about taking time to work the problems backwards. Hopefully since we've talked about how she thinks she loses focus she will be more aware of that as well. I will also ask her what she thinks about working the easiest problems first.
Thanks for all the ideas. Hopefully she'll see some improvements.
