710 Q47 95th Percentile DS, 27th Percentile PS - What's going on?

Hello, pwculliton. Yes, that is an odd breakdown, and you are correct in saying that most test-takers have more trouble taking on DS questions than their PS counterparts. What does your ESR tell you in terms of the breakdown by topic? (I know the ESR does not go into too much detail about content, but still.) Do you remember struggling more certain questions? You will have to be honest with yourself if you are going to get to the bottom of the problem. Is your approach to PS questions off in general? Do you feel the need to solve everything? Remember, there are five answer choices there for you, and certain question types (e.g., those asking about the value of a single unknown) lend themselves to solving backwards from the answers. Sometimes a blunt approach can work, too, one in which you use the answers as a logical gauge and then eliminate the obvious outliers to deal with just the subset of answers that may work. An example might be a percentage problem with answers such as 12.5, 14.6, 16.8, 20.2 and 23.7. Testing a value such as 15 percent could quickly help you assess whether the answer needed to be higher or lower, closer to 15 or not, and you could probably solve the problem much faster than most people who would take a more traditional approach and work out the exact answer.

How can you improve your PS approach in a week? By all means, if you have access to unattempted OG questions, work through some of them. A bit of advice from a recent 760 scorer was to place emphasis on Easy and Medium questions, believe it or not, since the test harshly punishes mistakes on such questions. The Hard problems can be both fun and challenging, but you are unlikely to see too many of them with a preset ceiling in the upper 40s if you keep goofing up on, say, Medium questions. Pay attention to your timing, too, across different types of questions and different difficulty levels. Are you going too fast on easier questions, and is that causing you to make careless errors? I suspect that right now, the balance is weighted in favor of speed. You probably focus on getting an answer in 2 minutes or less, and then you move on. Focus on building your understanding and honing your approach instead, and efficiency will follow.

In addition to OG questions, you may want to explore some of the homegrown questions right here on GMAT Club. Bunuel comes up with many clever questions, full of the same types of traps that the GMAT™ likes to toss in. My advice would be to focus again on 600-700-level questions, though. If you can earn a near-perfect DS sub-score, then you can probably rise to the occasion for the most part when you see tougher problems in front of you. You just have to see them in the first place.

Good luck with your studies. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

- Andrew