Dear jppaa,

I would find it difficult to hazard a guess, only because a few important things are not clear. It's great that you are reading explanations and learning from them --- I guess one question is: when you see the same concept again in a new question, with what frequency to you make the same mistake? Ideally, you would never make the same mistake twice, but that's hard to do. Your potential for change depends, in part, on your ability to learn from previous mistakes and to avoid them.

Relatedly, you say you are getting "a better understanding", and I would ask you to reflect a bit on that word. Consider the distinction of "six levels of understanding" described in this blog post:
http://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/understand ... rformance/
At what level is your "understanding" of the hard questions?

To some extent, focusing on the bird's eye view (how well am I doing overall? what's my predicted score) is very much besides the point. For each hard question you get wrong, what are the concepts and strategies you could have used to avoid your mistake? I would recommend keeping your focus down in the trenches, at the level of individual questions and individual concepts and individual strategies. Ironically, the attention you pay to "big picture" stuff, overall performance, actually contributes zilch to your overall performance, and may even take value time & energy & focus away from the specifics you need to master. Here's a more philosophical post along these lines:
http://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/the-gmat-b ... g-picture/

Does all this make sense?

Mike
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Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test Prep

If you want to judge how well you are doing on the difficult questions, where you need improvement, and what steps that might take to improve, then we get exceedingly little useful information about those important things simply from percentages and overall right/wrong ratios. The real learning for the GMAT happens at the detail level. For example, if there are questions for which you don't understand the explanation, or you don't feel confident that you will remember the explanation and be able to avoid the same mistake next time, these would be great individual posts on GC. If you see any patterns of mistakes, that also would be an excellent thing to discuss in a post. Make it your goal to milk every difficult question, all of them but especially the ones you got wrong, for every ounce of learning you could possibly squeeze out of them --- this may well involve posting each one on this forum (or finding where they are already posted) and reading what various experts have to say about them.

I would also recommend perusing our free blog ----
http://magoosh.com/gmat/
Some of the articles will cover basic stuff, but I believe, if you search through the whole blog, you will find several tips for handing tricky questions of all categories. Magoosh also has solutions for all the math & SC questions posted on Youtube --- search there.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MagooshGMAT

Also, here's a free DS question:
http://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/984
and here's a free CR question:
http://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/3117
For each one of those, after your submit your answer, the following page will have a video explanation. Each one of our 800+ GMAT questions has its own video explanation, for accelerated learning.

I hope all this helps.

Mike
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Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test Prep