sidash wrote:
Hi there,
I have a very serious question and I don't know what to do? I have my exam scheduled on 9th August. Though, many of my concepts have been cleared by watching
magoosh videos but still i dont know how to get my questions right when I am practicing because although i understand the concepts and all but I fail to apply them when i am solving a question. I mean I never get them answer right? I dont know why and what to do?
Many thanks in advance to everyone who would be answering this
Dear Sidash,
I'm happy to respond.
In what you say is a paradox. You say, "
although I understand the concepts and all but I fail to apply them when I am solving a question." You see, in math, you don't truly understand anything until you can use it in problem-solving. This suggests to me that what you are calling "
understanding" is not yet true understanding.
Rather than thinking in terms of the binary, "I understand" vs. "I don't understand", I would suggest thinking in terms of levels of understanding. Here's a blog in which I talk about levels of understanding:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/understand ... rformance/You may find some insight there.
I will also say: mathematics is a demanding and unforgiving teacher. For a GMAT math problem, you may need to know, say, 15 different math factoids. If you know only 14 of the 15, you will get the problem wrong. On the GMAT, there's no "partial credit" for having mostly the right idea (there's no partial credit in the business world either!) Success in math depends precise attention to detail --- if you are operating only at the big picture level, and not keeping very careful track of details, you will get one question wrong after another.
I will say: your report that "I never get the answers right" contains almost no information. If you want to be successful in math, you have to keep a meticulously organized
error log. For each question, you need to write down exactly why you got the question wrong, exactly what you needed to remember, exactly what detail you overlooked, etc. It is entirely insufficient to skim the explanation and say, "Oh, yeah, I knew that." For any question you get wrong, you need to comb through the explanation, looking for every last detail of what you missed or or should have know. You need to write about both why the right answer is right and why what you did is wrong. Again, success in math depends on organizing the details with precision, and if you get the problem wrong, you have to do twice as much precision in the details in your
error log for the problem.
If, for any problem, you don't feel the explanation you have is thorough enough, come to GC. Don't post it in a new thread: most
OG problems and other problems from major sources are already posted here. Search for the problem, find the threads where it is already mentioned, and read the explanations there. If you don't find a sufficient explanation, solicit expert help: you are always welcome to send me a private message with a link, asking for my input. You need to understand all the correct steps for solving it, and you also need to understand, in detail, why the approach you took was wrong.
Each question you get wrong is a golden opportunity to improve yourself if you do all the work you can do to learn from it. If you are superficial in your treatment of questions you get wrong, you will never make any progress.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)