Hi!
Since you’re shooting for a high quant score, it definitely makes sense to include high difficulty quant problems in your practice. The important thing is that
you shouldn’t exclusively do high difficulty problems.Here’s why: The GMAT is an adaptive test, and your section score is based on where you end up in terms of the difficulty mix of the questions you’re seeing.
The first step to a high score is getting 100% of the easy questions correct. And even if you have a strong quant background, this isn’t something you should assume will happen automatically. The GMAT is good at seeding little traps in easy questions, and you’ll want to get familiar with those in advance so that they don’t catch you on the test.
You’ll also need to
get a high percentage of medium difficulty questions correct — enough that the GMAT keeps bouncing you between medium and high difficulty, rather than dipping you back into easy territory.
The bar is actually the lowest for high difficulty questions. Sure, you want to be able to get some of them right, but you don’t have to get all of them right to get a strong score.
So as you practice high difficulty questions, make sure you’re continuing to do mixed, timed problem sets that include easy and medium questions. And if you’re not getting high percentage accuracy on those levels yet, prioritize that before spending a lot of time on tougher questions.
At ManhattanPrep, we do a deep-dive into GMAT scoring and how it impacts study strategy in our
Free GMAT Trial Classes Best,