GMAT Club Tests: How do you review?

meddlin, i dont think i answered your first question.

i found my 45 was combination of both concepts and careless errors.

And I do not recommend the challenges (if you are scoring below 45) before you make sure your fundamentals are really down. Even I, at 45 starting, went back to do that, then attacked the challenges.

The challenges I dont think are meant to give you an idea of where you currently stand, but rather help you improve in solving tough math problems.

I know the manhatten guides are pricey, but for math i think if you get those books, the OG 11, and the challenges. And go through ALL of them, you are looking at a 45 +.

Once you get to 47, 48 or so, its really about how quickly you can think. Again, the challenges will 'harden' you into a quicker thinker.

I have to say I read people discussing whether or not to pay the 70 bucks or so for the challenges. I dont think there is a better deal out there.

Don't get discouraged by the test. I've done about 14 sets so far, it's just painful to go thru everytime.

At times, their explanations and OA are incorrect, so search this forum, and most of them have been acknowledged and answered by people already.

I learned alot by understanding the concept behind problems. Also, I found that I was weak on stats/prob. problem, so I researched and tried to learn the basics of them.

I am trying to get my 250 quality posts so I can get the challenges! Wow, a 42 to a 48 is a nice improvement and one that I would like to make as well. I am at a 42Q on GMAT Prep. Ive heard that the challenges are mainly for the 47+ level trying to get to the 50+. What do you think of that lanter1?

I am glad that I am not the only one being kicked by the gmatclub challenges.. My purpose of doing these tests is to boost my Q from 41 to 48. I found the challenges paricularly good in stopping me from doing careless mistakes.
Also the challenges provide me an alternative approach (read more clever) to certain problems, and in particular DS.
To keep my confidence up, I also frequently go through my earlier mistakes in OG11. My experience with a couple of clubchallenge test the OG11 actually feels more easy...

guys, do the challenges.

i started at 45 gmatprep. and got 48 on the real deal. and im going to retake gmat. simply put, i feel like i should have gotten 49, maybe 50, but didnt cause i lacked a bit at end on doing challenges.

i did 15 total.

out of every possible study source available, i would rank the manhattan sc guide as #1, and the challenges as #2.

i can't say enough how valuable they are.

I'm in a similar boat. I've been through all the mgmat topic series (except geometry), which really helped shore up my fundamentals. The challenges are now highlighting my weaknesses in two areas:

1) Reading and comprehending the details of specifics in question prompts
2) alerting me to question types that I'm not that good with - mixture problems, and complicated systems of equations. (I am terrible at age problems with more than 2 people)

I don't write each problem down I get wrong, although I probably should. Instead, I'm keeping a list of my weaknesses and using MGMAT and OG to practice the fundamentals and then try realistic problems.

Right now I'm on pace to finish the OG Q supplement by end of the week, and from there I'll focus on challenges, CATs, and spend a little time on Verbal. I would be happy with a 44-45 on quant. My last GMATprep was a 44, my real GMAT in January was Q39/V42.

In general I think these tests are a good tool. Not great. But good. I will give them a hearty recommendation if you have exhausted your OG and Oficial Quantitative Reviews and are looking for alternate materials. Of what I have seen, this is second best.

My complaints are that the questions are often stupid tricky, uninterpretable or unnecessarily complex. In addition, the explanations are suspect at best.

My first concern is that the questions are often unbearably tricky. Sometimes to the point of being unrealistic. They will test your ability to remember that zero is an even number or something ridiculous like that. That being said. You will not make the same mistake twice, which has to count for something. If you do a couple of the challenges you will immediately know what I mean. Your first emotion to the questions will approach anger. Then after a couple you realize that even though the question is ridiculous, you did learn something. Which is the point of all this after all.

A further complaint is that some of the questions are so grammatically incorrect or poorly written that it is possible to get the question wrong just because you dont understand what is being asked. The one where you have to measure the fish is a good example. The one with the swimmer and the currents is perfect example of a poorly written question because it is possible the current is faster than the swimmer can swim and the swimmer would never reach their destination. Not all the possibilities are considered by the question makers.

I also feel these questions are unnecessarily complex. In the official GMAT questions, fractions seem to have a way of working out. Where as in the challenges it always seems I have to multiply a somewhat unreasonable 23/110 by 7/62 or something of this nature. And it is not that I am doing the question incorrectly, the explanation (which is often lacking at best) tells me I am on the right path. Instead of testing my ability on a concept they test me on multiplication. Blah.

Its almost like whoever wrote these questions took the same concepts that were available and just raised the level of technical difficulty instead of the level of conceptual difficulty. My opinion is that the GMAT is more likely to test your ability to understand and integrate concepts rather than your ability to multiple and divide by obnoxious numbers.

In all, I would estimate that about 20% of the questions are really good, strong, thoughtful questions that are representative of what you would find on the GMAT Prep software. The other 80% fall into a category such as grammatically unsound/not interpretable, trick questions or unnecessarily technical.

That being said, I would still recommend these. They do teach you to look for tricks. They do force you to preform long division and multiplication of fractions by hand, which is great practice. And those 20% of good questions are a good challenge. Most importantly, the challenges time you and put some pressure on. That all adds up to a worthwhile expenditure as long as you have exhausted your official materials first.

On a side note, is it possible that these percentile rankings are no longer valid? Is it possible that the same person has written the exam multiple times, done really well on their subsequent attempts and is therefore skewing all the results downward?

If I took my average over the first 8 of these that I have completed it would be somewhere around the 50th percentile. Which is a Q36ish. When I took the GMAT Prep 1 exam prior to the GMATclub challenges I scored a Q48 which is like 85th percentile. I will be interested to see what my Q score is on GMATPrep2 and the actual exam to see if these challenges do indeed have a positive impact and do actually reflect my abilities.

I just finished writing my analysis of my missed questions. Going to take M02 in the morning, and I WILL do better on this one. Did any of you who took these tests also continue to practice OG Quant problems to get exposure to GMAT probs?

I took the second challenge this morning (M02), and again, missed far too many. While I scored 3 more correct answers (22) than in M01, my percentile actually shot down to the 16% area. But, I need to have a reality check regarding how much work I actually need in this area. I'm not sure if some of you who say you were getting killed by these things early have been doing as poorly as I have been. I definitely want to get my quant score up to the 48-50 area within the next month. However, I want to ensure I'm taking the proper steps. Are these challenges only designed for those who are nailing all other GMAT Quant questions, but struggling with those that would push their score up past the 45 barrier? If I'm learning the concepts in the hard problems, I'm assuming it's going to help me crush those easy to medium questions in the OG 11 and the GMAT. Your thoughts, as always, are greatly appreciated.

Irishspring,

Thank you for your recommendation. When you were scoring 45 on the gmatprep, did you find that you were making conceptual or careless errors? On my first Princeton Review CAT, I only scored 36. Through my analysis of the challenges, I realized I am making a large amount of careless errors. I realize that these problems are along the same lines as difficult-level GMAT problems. But, I want to ensure I'm developing the requisite knowledge to GET to those hard problems on the GMAT. Would you say these challenges will help me get there, or are they mostly useful for refinement from mid 40s to 50?

Thanks again for your input.

Well I think the challenges are good for anyone at any level. but let me say, dont jump into them untill you have firm grasp of the concepts. I took the first one, scored horribly. Realized, even starting with a 45, that I need a complete review of all the possible concepts tested. I think its incredibly important to get the fundamentals down, then build from there.

Your score indicates to me you need to probably become a little stronger with the fundamentals, and your speed in some of the basic math.

If i were you, I would do this. Manhattan Review has, again, in my opinion done an excellent job of outling all the math concepts you need to know for the GMAT in their series. (By the way i have no affiliation with Manhattan). Going through their math books can be a bit tedious (and boring). Yes alot of it is stuff you of course no. But by going through it, you are able to review the basic stuff and have a single source which contains all the concepts you need to know. Go through their books. Then do the Challenges.

I see no reason, for any reasonably intelligent person, who follows this process to not score 45 + on the math. It takes time, to be sure, but it can be done.

Thanks again for your responses. My scores have certainly been poor on the first two, but as I correct my mistakes from the first two challenges, I feel my ability improving. I am definitely going to take your advice and review quant concepts, but still try to do a weekly math challenge at first, and then progress back toward two challenges. I'm taking another practice GMAT CAT tomorrow morning, so it should give some indication what I need to focus my studies on. I will say that, after taking a couple challenges, the difficult OG 11 problems don't look quite as daunting as they did before.

I completed all of the GMAT Club tests over a span of 2 weeks prior to my exam. The questions were fair and representative to a certain extent. I found that on the test there were more "applied" math problems. We are used to the speed, rate, work problems but I had two questions dealing with volume & density and another dealing with electrical power. Pretty straight forward stuff but it threw me for a loop and I ended up messing up all three questions (first three questions of the damn test!). Hence the 49.

Thinking about buying...

I would recommend this to everyone but only after you build up a very solid math foundation. It's one thing to understand how to do every type of math question but its a totally different thing to handle hard question after hard question in a timely manner. The GMAT will continue to give you time consuming and tricky questions if you continue to perform well. The GMAT Club tests represent this aspect of the test well. So if you are scoring high on the practice tests or know your math very well, buy these tests. If not, keep working away on math problems until you are scoring high in practice (untimed).

The questions are very representative. After completing all of the tests I found some of the harder concepts like probability and inequalities to be much easier. I noticed the variation in question types and the tricks and pitfalls in both types of math questions. Data Sufficiency also turned into a strength and problem solving questions became "gimmies"


Sample Scores

m01: you answered correctly 30 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m01 is 75.5%
m02: you answered correctly 34 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m02 is 93.1%
m03: you answered correctly 30 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m03 is 79.3%
m04: you answered correctly 32 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m04 is 84.9%
m05: you answered correctly 34 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m05 is 96.0%
m06: you answered correctly 35 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m06 is 97.4%
m07: you answered correctly 36 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m07 is 98.5%
m08: you answered correctly 35 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m08 is 97.2%
m09: you answered correctly 34 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m09 is 95.0%
m10: you answered correctly 31 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m10 is 85.1% (late night)
m11: you answered correctly 34 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m11 is 92.5%
m12: you answered correctly 34 out of 37 questions; your percentile on test m12 is 94.5%
so and so forth...

The 2 free tests are fairly patterned with Difficult & simple questions.
I was very impressed by the question set. I am done with the free tests & looking forward to tother quetions

I am also looking forward to solving those challenges. I feel I am at 48+ level and would like to take it to 50+ level. I just gave kaplan CAT 3 and scored 52 on Math (with 15 extra minutes left at the end). I thought Kaplan tests are harder but for some reason I finished Math 15 minutes before and with a score of 52. I feel something is wrong. Anyone has a same experience?

Meddling,

I usually don't review as much as I should. It looks like you are doing a really good job with the error log.

Hello to everyone! I just make my first stepps to GMAT praparation and i m very pleased that i have found gmatclub. At the moment is it not to easy for me to write messages in English because it isnt my mother tongue und i didnt use English for a lond time. But I am going to be active on This Forum and who knows, maybe i can improve my English here from reading another messages. Could anybody advie me what i need to go the next. I have bought official Guide, then i have read math reviev part. Some items i k now from school but i think i need more practise. What shall i do as next? To take some online Gmat math tests? I will be glad to become an advise.