Hi bansalsaurabh7,
I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. First off, great job with quant! A Q48 is a pretty awesome quant score. That being said, based on the description of your study routine and the scores from your practice exams vs. your goal score, it’s clear that you have been taking practice exams before you are ready. GMAT practice tests best serve two main purposes. The first purpose is to provide diagnostic information. In other words, by taking a practice test, you can get a sense of what types of GMAT questions you’re comfortable answering and arrive at a reasonable estimation of how you would score on the GMAT at that point in time. The second purpose is, naturally, to provide a way to practice taking the GMAT and handling its various challenges, such as time pressure and the varying difficulty of the questions presented.
People often misuse practice tests as primary learning tools. You may have seen posts that go something like the following: A person with a score goal of 740 has been preparing for six weeks, has already taken all six of the official practice tests, and is wondering why her scores have been 600, 590, 570, 610, 600, and 560. In such a case, the person likely has been using practice tests as primary learning tools, meaning that taking practice tests has been much of, or possibly most of, what she has been doing to drive up her score.
Can practice tests be valuable tools for learning and continued score improvement? Yes, of course they can, if they are used properly and at optimal times in your preparation. However, practice tests should not be used as primary learning vehicles because practice tests don’t really provide the kind of practice that you need to increase your score. To improve your score, you need to learn the basics of answering various types of GMAT questions, and then practice applying what you have learned by carefully answering practice questions in order to learn to answer them correctly. When you first learn how to answer a particular type of question, answering that type of question correctly can easily take way longer than the two minutes or so per question that you are allotted when taking the GMAT (or a practice test). Two minutes per question can fly by, and if you want to finish the sections of the test on time, in many cases, regardless of whether you have figured out how to answer a question, you may have to just answer and move on. So, while taking a practice test can be a great way to work on your overall approach to taking the GMAT, taking a practice test is not a great way to practice getting right answers to various types of questions. To effectively prepare for the GMAT, you have to practice answering questions of each type without the time constraints of the test and work up to a point at which you can answer questions of each type in around two minutes. Thus, there is very limited utility in taking practice tests before you have done substantial preparation. When you take multiple practice tests early in your prep, the tests simply underscore exactly what you already know: You need to learn more content and develop more skills to hit your score goal. Why spend three hours taking a practice test just to learn what you already know, wasting a valuable learning tool in the process?
Of course, you can benefit from taking one diagnostic practice test early in your preparation. Furthermore, once you’ve done substantial preparation and mastered much of the content tested on the GMAT, when you sit for practice tests, they will actually show, to some degree, lingering weak areas that require further study. I say “to some degree” because although practice tests provide a pretty good approximation of how a person would score on the GMAT at a particular point in time, the sample size of questions on any practice test is rather small (31 quant questions and 36 verbal questions), so practice tests don’t do a very good job of pinpointing specific areas of weakness.
For example, let’s assume that of the 31 quant questions on a given practice test, you encounter one Rate-Time-Distance question and get it wrong. Should you conclude that you need extensive work on Rate-Time-Distance questions? Of course not. Similarly, what if you correctly answered the Rate-Time-Distance question? Are you good to go on those questions? Maybe. But maybe not. In fact, let’s assume that you took six practice tests, saw a total of six Rate-Time-Distance questions, and correctly answered them all. Can you conclude that you’re solid on Rate-Time-Distance questions? Probably not. One thing that makes the GMAT challenging is the vast potential for variation in the questions. There are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of variations of Rate-Time-Distance questions that can appear on the test. So, correctly answering five or six (or ten) Rate-Time-Distance questions doesn’t really tell you too much. You must take care not to over-infer based on practice tests alone.
To truly improve your GMAT quant and verbal skills, and before taking any further tests, consider adjusting your study plan such that it allows for linear learning. Looking at your current study routine, it appears that your prep is centered on doing practice questions. While engaging in practice is a necessary part of improving your GMAT skills, such practice is only beneficial after you have studied the necessary topics on which those questions are based. Moving forward, consider using a resource that allows you FIRST to learn the concepts and strategies related to GMAT quant and verbal and SECOND to practice with a large number of realistic questions.
If you’d like some further advice on how to improve your quant and verbal skills, feel free to reach out, and I’d be happy to help. You also may find my article with more information regarding
how to score a 700+ on the GMAT helpful.
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26 Oct 2018, 22:00
