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GMAT Ninja’s 13-Week Study Plan - Week 2
Week 2 (~15 hours)
Subscribe via E-mail | Study Plan Chat Group
Welcome back! If you have no idea what’s going on here, then you’ll want to start with Week 1 instead.
For the rest of you: it’s Week 2. You might already hate me. Here, have some homework!
Read this debrief by souvik101990, one of the legends of GMAT Club. He spent FOUR YEARS studying, and eventually scored a 760. Yes, the GMAT can be hard.
In case you’re wondering: souvik101990 graduated from Ross and now works at a very large company, where he sometimes delivers advice directly to the c-suite execs. The dude’s epic hard work paid off.
You might also be entertained by this thread on the biggest GMAT and MBA application mistakes, featuring some great material by bb, AndrewN, and others.
In Week 2, we have two main goals for quant:
I know: still not sexy. But we’ll ramp up the difficulty at least a bit this week.
How to approach quant homework
Be honest with yourself: did you make silly errors on quant in Week 1? If you’re not sure, go back through all of your sets and categorize your mistakes. Even if you make boneheaded errors on, say, 5-10% of questions, that’s WAY too much on an adaptive test like the GMAT.
In Week 2: if you’re making a lot of careless errors, choose the sub-600 sets until you STOP MAKING CARELESS ERRORS. If you’re free of sloppy errors, feel free to choose mixed difficulty on items #4-8. We’d recommend keeping a few easy ones in there for now though, so you don’t get complacent.
What to do AFTER completing a quant homework set
Need help with quant?
If you make careless errors or struggle on this week’s content, these resources might help:
In Weeks 2 and 3, we’ll try to ease your pain on specific RC topic areas, starting with science passages. Maybe they scare you, and maybe they don’t.
Either way: your process for RC shouldn’t change at all based on the passage type -- or your mood, or the weather, or what you had for breakfast (
), or anything else. The goal on RC is always to develop a 100% consistent approach to reading -- and that’s harder than it sounds. Stick with it!
How to approach RC homework
What to do AFTER completing an RC homework set
Need help with RC?
If you struggled with the RC homework, here are some resources that might help:
This week, we’ll start to pick on some of the most fundamental CR question types: strengthen, weaken, and assumption questions.
Just as for RC, the core principle for CR is that your process shouldn’t change much based on the question type. Your goal is to become 100% consistent in how you read and comprehend CR passages -- and that’s much, much harder than it sounds.
How to approach CR homework
What to do AFTER completing a CR homework set
Need help with CR?
If you struggled with the CR homework, here are some resources that might help:
No SC for you this week! Again.
We know: ignoring SC just doesn’t feel quite right. But you’ve probably already noticed that we’re giving you a LOT of work on RC, CR, and quant right now. Those things generally take longer to improve than SC, and remember that there’s a limited supply of worthwhile SC practice questions.
Don’t worry: we’ll start the sentence correction mayhem next week. You’re excited, right?
You’ll get tired of reading this, but IR and AWA are always optional in this study plan. Why? Nobody really cares about them. Spend your time elsewhere, please.
Week 2 (~15 hours)
Subscribe via E-mail | Study Plan Chat Group
Welcome back! If you have no idea what’s going on here, then you’ll want to start with Week 1 instead.
For the rest of you: it’s Week 2. You might already hate me. Here, have some homework!
(A) Inspiration & Advice (optional)+
Read this debrief by souvik101990, one of the legends of GMAT Club. He spent FOUR YEARS studying, and eventually scored a 760. Yes, the GMAT can be hard.
In case you’re wondering: souvik101990 graduated from Ross and now works at a very large company, where he sometimes delivers advice directly to the c-suite execs. The dude’s epic hard work paid off.
You might also be entertained by this thread on the biggest GMAT and MBA application mistakes, featuring some great material by bb, AndrewN, and others.
(B) Quant (~3-6 hrs.)+
In Week 2, we have two main goals for quant:
- 1. Address any major weaknesses in your command of the fundamentals of figure geometry, exponents, inequalities, and absolute values. Nothing fancy here: just the very basics for now.
2. Continue to ensure that you don’t make score-killing silly errors.
I know: still not sexy. But we’ll ramp up the difficulty at least a bit this week.
How to approach quant homework
- 1. Time each set, but don’t rush through. Do every set with test-like intensity, but don’t impose an artificial time limit -- at least not yet.
2. When you’re finished, please do NOT review your errors at all just yet. On the day you do the homework, just input the results into your error log, and walk away. For more on how to analyze your results, check out the next post in this thread.
Week 2 quant homework
Be honest with yourself: did you make silly errors on quant in Week 1? If you’re not sure, go back through all of your sets and categorize your mistakes. Even if you make boneheaded errors on, say, 5-10% of questions, that’s WAY too much on an adaptive test like the GMAT.
In Week 2: if you’re making a lot of careless errors, choose the sub-600 sets until you STOP MAKING CARELESS ERRORS. If you’re free of sloppy errors, feel free to choose mixed difficulty on items #4-8. We’d recommend keeping a few easy ones in there for now though, so you don’t get complacent.
- 1. GMAT Quant Guide (skinny little book) PS #1-25. Any edition is fine.
2. Official Guide PS #26-50
3. First 25 DS questions from the GMAT Quant Guide (the exact question numbers will vary depending on which edition you’re using)
4. Do 25 geometry PS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
5. Do 25 geometry DS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
6. Do 10 exponents PS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
7. Do 10 exponents DS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
8. (Optional) Only if you’re sure that you need the extra reps: do more sets from items #4-7
9. (Very, very optional) Quant section only from the GMAT Club tests or another NON-official source (save the mba.com exams for later!)
What to do AFTER completing a quant homework set
- 1-3 days after completing the set, redo your errors from scratch. Try to “wash your brains” and pretend that you’ve never seen the questions before.
- If you get most of the questions RIGHT the second time: you’re probably making careless errors, and fixing them needs to be your #1 priority. See below for some videos that might help.
- If you miss a question twice, don’t overreact. Obsessively studying individual questions drains a TON of your study time – if you miss a particular question, you’ll probably never see anything quite like it again. So focus on GENERAL takeaways on how to improve -- don’t spend hours memorizing steps for individual questions.
- For more on how to interpret your results, see the next post in this thread.
Need help with quant?
If you make careless errors or struggle on this week’s content, these resources might help:
- 1. If you’re STILL making careless errors, this algebra video describes a process for approaching ALL quant questions, starting at the 1:01 mark.
2. If you’re struggling with the fundamental content this week, check out this GMAT geometry video, this “intermediate” geometry video, or this exponent video.
3. GMAT Club Math Book
4. Heroic quant threads from Bunuel: Ultimate GMAT Quant Megathread | Signature Question Collection | All You Need for Quant
(C) Reading Comprehension (~2 hrs.)+
In Weeks 2 and 3, we’ll try to ease your pain on specific RC topic areas, starting with science passages. Maybe they scare you, and maybe they don’t.
Either way: your process for RC shouldn’t change at all based on the passage type -- or your mood, or the weather, or what you had for breakfast (
), or anything else. The goal on RC is always to develop a 100% consistent approach to reading -- and that’s harder than it sounds. Stick with it!How to approach RC homework
- 1. Time each set, but don’t rush through. Do every set with test-like intensity, but don’t impose an artificial time limit -- at least not yet.
2. When you’re finished, please do NOT review your errors at all just yet. On the day you do the homework, just input the results into your error log, and walk away.
Week 2 RC homework
- 1. Watch this video on how to approach RC science passages. (Skip it if you’re 100% confident on science passages, but if you’re afraid of other topics, the messages in the video might help a bit.)
2. Do 3 science passages from older editions of the OGs; you can find some from OG 12 and the Verbal 2nd edition here.
3. Do a full LSAT RC set (~25 questions, ~ 1 hr). Click here if you’re wondering why there are LSAT sets in a GMAT study plan.
4. (Optional) One additional LSAT RC set (~25 questions, ~ 1 hr)
What to do AFTER completing an RC homework set
- Don’t obsess over the questions you missed. You’re never going to see these passages again, and you don’t want to burn too much time reviewing them.
- Instead, focus on general patterns. Did you miss a bunch of primary purpose questions? Inference questions? Did you get intimidated by certain types of passages? Did you panic? Run out of energy? Pay special attention to errors that surprised you – did you somehow make a silly mistake?
- If you missed three or more questions on a passage, you might consider redoing the entire passage (and its questions) from scratch. If you do better the second time, ask yourself: what should you have done differently the first time?
- For more on how to interpret your RC results, see the next post in this thread.
Need help with RC?
If you struggled with the RC homework, here are some resources that might help:
(D) Critical Reasoning (~2 hrs.)+
This week, we’ll start to pick on some of the most fundamental CR question types: strengthen, weaken, and assumption questions.
Just as for RC, the core principle for CR is that your process shouldn’t change much based on the question type. Your goal is to become 100% consistent in how you read and comprehend CR passages -- and that’s much, much harder than it sounds.
How to approach CR homework
- 1. Time each set, but don’t rush through. Do every set with test-like intensity, but don’t impose an artificial time limit -- at least not yet.
2. When you’re finished, please do NOT review your errors at all just yet. On the day you do the homework, just input the results into your error log, and walk away.
Week 2 CR homework
- 1. Watch this “CR 102” video that discusses tougher variants on strengthen, weaken, and assumption questions.
2. (Optional) Do a set of 10-15 strengthen/weaken questions from older editions of the OGs; you can find some from OG 12 and the Verbal 2nd ed. here.
3. Do 10 assumption questions from older editions of the OGs; you can find some from OG 12 and the Verbal 2nd edition here.
4. Do a full LSAT CR set (~25 questions, ~ 1 hr). Click here to understand why we assign LSAT sets in a GMAT study plan.
5. (Optional) One additional LSAT RC set (~25 questions, ~ 1 hr)
What to do AFTER completing a CR homework set
- 1-3 days after completing the set, redo your errors from scratch. Do your best to “wash your brains” and pretend that you’ve never seen the questions before.
- If you get most of the questions RIGHT the second time, that’s a sign that your overall CR process isn’t nearly as consistent as it needs to be, and fixing your process needs to be your #1 area of focus. See below for some videos that might help.
- If you miss a question a second time, don’t overreact: obsessively studying individual questions can drain a TON of your study time – and it really isn’t very valuable on CR. So don’t spend hours memorizing the steps for individual questions.
- For more on how to interpret your CR results, see the next post in this thread.
Need help with CR?
If you struggled with the CR homework, here are some resources that might help:
(E) Sentence Correction (0 hrs.)+
No SC for you this week! Again.
We know: ignoring SC just doesn’t feel quite right. But you’ve probably already noticed that we’re giving you a LOT of work on RC, CR, and quant right now. Those things generally take longer to improve than SC, and remember that there’s a limited supply of worthwhile SC practice questions.
Don’t worry: we’ll start the sentence correction mayhem next week. You’re excited, right?
(F) IR & AWA (0 hrs.)+
You’ll get tired of reading this, but IR and AWA are always optional in this study plan. Why? Nobody really cares about them. Spend your time elsewhere, please.
25 Oct 2022, 22:27
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How to Interpret Your Week 2 Homework Results
Please read this section each week if you’re serious about optimizing your study time. Our goal is to help you understand how good or bad your results are, so that you can (A) choose your homework wisely, and (B) avoid wasting time reviewing questions that don’t really matter.
Obviously, some of this advice will be similar from week to week. But plenty of things will change, too. So if you’re panicking about a homework result – or if you’re tempted to spend a half-billion hours reviewing individual questions – please take a deep breath, and read through this post first.
Practice Tests+
Most of you probably didn't do a practice test this week, and that's great. Generally speaking, your time is best spent elsewhere right now.
If you took a non-official quant test (from GMAT Club or another source):
- Hopefully it didn't replace something that you needed more than a quant practice test. It was listed as optional – and as always, we want you to use your time wisely.
- Don't overreact to the score. It's nearly impossible for non-official practice tests to mimic the actual scoring of the GMAT, so the score itself doesn't matter much.
- Count your careless errors. No, really: please count them. In the long run, you’ll need to completely eliminate those careless errors on quant – and nothing else matters until you do.
- Count the number of questions that took 3+ minutes. In the long run, there should be none of these; this time management video might help a bit if you haven't already seen it.
- Don’t spend a ton of time reviewing every question you missed. We’ll say more about that in the quant section below.
Quant+
Benchmarks for Your Week 2 Quant Results
Before you do anything else:
- Count the errors that make you go "whoa, how the 🤬 did I miss THAT one?!?" No really: count them, for EVERY quant set you completed. Then divide that by the total number of questions to get your careless error rate.
If your long-term goal is to score in the high 40s, here are the metrics I’d like you to hit in Week 2:
- Careless error rate: < 5%. If you make careless errors on 5% of questions now, you’ll make far more under the pressure of the actual exam – maybe three times as many, which means that you’d make about 5 goofy errors on your actual test. And that will destroy your score. So please get this careless error rate down to 1-2% at most.
- OG & Quant Guide sets (#1-3 on the list): 85-90% correct is excellent, 80% is probably good. Just remember that WHAT you miss is more important on the GMAT than how many you missed: careless errors are apocalyptic. If you missed OG questions on topics that you haven't studied, that's totally cool -- you'll have time to learn those things.
- Randomized batches of forum questions (#4-8 on the list): 85-90% correct is good on the sub-600 questions, but if you did mixed difficulty sets, you’ll have to take the results with a grain of salt. If you happened to see nasty, strange questions, 50-60% might be pretty good. Don’t overreact if the percentage wasn’t great, though.
- Speed: On the OG and topic-based sets, you're in good shape if you’re reasonably close to 2 minutes per question. If you're slower than, say, 2:30 per question on average, it might be a sign that your basic skills are rusty, or that you're not choosing efficient paths forward -- and you'll be able to improve those things over time.
What Should You Do About Your Quant Weaknesses in Week 2?
First, an unpleasant truth: you’re probably going to miss 20-50% of the quant questions on the GMAT, regardless of your score. The goal of an adaptive exam is to find the level of question at which you get roughly 40-50% of the questions wrong. So even if you score in the high 40s on quant, you’re going to miss A LOT of questions – that’s just how the test works.
Also, if you make careless mistakes on easier questions, the GMAT will eat you for breakfast. You probably already know that from watching this short video on time management though, right?
The punchline: when you study, please pick your battles wisely. If you’re painstakingly reviewing every single question you missed, you’re probably missing the point.
Yes, you’ll want to look for signs that your foundations are shaky, and you’ll also need to eliminate careless errors. But if you’re getting abused by hard or obscure questions? That’s cool. Don’t waste too much of your precious study time on that stuff.
Here’s some guidance on what to do once you’ve analyzed your results:
- If your careless error rate is too high: address this problem ASAP. Nothing else matters on quant until you do. Check out the resource list in the study plan for help.
- If you struggled on specific topics (algebra, geometry, exponents), don’t panic. It’s far too easy to overreact to a few errors, and study these problems until your eyeballs burst. Instead, try to put your struggles in context: did you miss particularly hard or strange versions of these questions? Were your errors careless? If so, you probably don’t need to do much studying, exactly. But if you missed basic questions because your foundations are shaky, then you might need to do some remedial studying, and it might even make sense to “pause” the study plan to do so – but don’t assume that you need to do this unless the data is very, very clear about your weaknesses.
- If you struggled on the OG or Quant Guide sets: don’t panic. Again: ask yourself WHY you struggled. If you’re at, say, 70-80% accuracy, that’s not ideal right now. But context matters: if mosts of those errors are on topics you’ve never really studied, you’re in great shape, since you have plenty of time to learn those in the next 11 weeks.
- If you got CRUSHED by ALL of the quant homework: if you’re nowhere close to the benchmarks on quant – and if your long-term goal is a high-40s score – then maybe you need to back away from the study plan, and invest some time in rebuilding your basic quant skills. If that’s the case for you, tag us in the thread, give us as much detail as you can about your situation, and we’ll try to help.
- How much time should you spend reviewing individual quant questions? Not much, please! Because it can take SOOOOOOO much time to review a question, it should be your absolute last resort. That’s why we want you to redo questions first – sometimes, you’ll see your mistake right away, and that’s the best way to learn. If you miss a question a second time, then maybe it’s a sign of an underlying issue.
- No, really: resist the temptation to obsess over individual questions. Instead, look for patterns in your errors – an error on one question might be a fluke (or a weird, hard, or badly written question), but if you miss several related questions, you have an opportunity to get a good ROI on your study time by addressing a general weakness via a video or articles or books.
Verbal+
First, another unpleasant truth: LSAT sets are HARD. If you’re not in pain, you’re probably not doing it right.
Improving on RC and CR is usually a slow, agonizing process. Don’t get discouraged – keep fighting to read a little bit more sharply, every time you do a set. Keep fighting to be more consistent in how you approach sets. For most test-takers, improving on CR and RC is the hardest thing to accomplish, because there are no formulas or “tricks” that can help.
So please be patient with yourself, and be nice to yourself. Be proud when your results tick upwards a little bit, and don’t beat yourself up when you have a bad set. Slow, steady progress is beautiful. Even when it really hurts.
Benchmarks for Your Week 2 Verbal Results
- Accuracy on LSAT CR & RC sets: if your goal is a 40V or above, we eventually want to see 80% accuracy on LSAT CR and RC. That’s your long-run goal. It’s OK if you’re not quite there in Week 2.
- Efficiency on LSAT CR & RC sets: in the long run, you’ll need to complete full LSAT sets in under 60 minutes to have a shot at finishing the GMAT verbal section on time. If you’re in the 60-70 minute range right now, that’s still OK – you have time to become more efficient and energetic in your approach. If you’re slower than that, we might be worried. More on that below.
- Consistency on LSAT CR & RC sets: your errors and times should fall within a fairly narrow range across ALL of your LSAT sets. LSAT sets (~25 Qs each) do not vary much in difficulty, so if your errors or times fluctuate wildly, that’s a sign that you’re doing very different things at different times – and that’s not cool. You’ll certainly struggle more on some passages than others, but the results on the full sets of ~25 questions should be pretty stable.
- GMAT OG & Verbal Guide RC & CR questions: we can’t give you a benchmark, because it just depends on the difficulty level of the questions that you happened to do. All I can say is that you’ll want to look for HUGE patterns in your mistakes: are science passages freaking you out? Are you overwhelmingly missing a certain question type? If the patterns are CLEAR, they’re worth addressing, but don’t overreact to a question or two.
What Should You Do About Your Verbal Weaknesses in Week 2?
- Don’t panic. CR and RC progress can be slow. Take a long view: are you seeing ANY improvement in your average accuracy and times from Week 1 until now? If so, great – even if that improvement is small.
- Look for “careless” errors. As with everything on the GMAT, pay close attention to anything that seemed to be an “unforced error.” Did you miss a ton of questions that felt easy to you? If so, you might want to revisit the techniques in the videos and articles in the assignment list.
- If your results are significantly better on RC than on CR: that’s not a bad thing! There’s no reason why you can’t bring your CR results to the level of your RC, but something is funky in your approach to CR. In the coming weeks, you might want to invest time in some extra CR sets or videos – we’ll provide recommendations each week.
- If you’re better at CR than RC: again, this isn’t a bad thing! You can bring your RC up to the level of your CR. When this happens, the most common reasons are that you’re obsessing over details when you read RC (and missing the “big picture” by doing so), or you’re struggling to stay focused through a long passage. Maybe you’ll want to err on the side of getting a bit of extra practice on RC in the coming weeks, and we’ll keep feeding you videos that might help.
- If you’re slow ( > 60 mins per LSAT set): well, I wish that I could tell you exactly what’s happening, but there are a ton of different reasons why your times might be high. At this stage, maybe you’re still learning new approaches, so you’re still figuring out how to integrate them into your process – if that’s the case, your times will come down. Maybe you’re not doing each set with test-like intensity. Maybe there’s inefficiency in your process – and if that’s the case, it’s likely that you’re still struggling to fully incorporate the techniques that you’ll see in the videos. It’s also possible that you’re a slow reader, and that’s a hard thing to fix. I wish I could tell you which of these things is happening – but you’ll have to figure that part out for yourself, unfortunately.
- If you’re getting impatient with your results: hey, it’s Week 2. If you’re above 80% on your LSAT sets, you’re doing GREAT. If you’re in the 60-80% range, you still have time to improve.
- If you’re getting CRUSHED on CR & RC: my heart hurts for you, because that’s a terrible feeling. If your goal is something like a 30V or a 35V, our benchmarks are too aggressive – so 60% or below on your LSAT sets might not be too bad. But if you have ambitious goals (40V+) and you’re truly struggling to understand the passages, it’s possible that you need to spend some time working on your fundamental reading skills before returning to GMAT-specific verbal prep. This article and this one will give you some ideas for how to improve your reading precision over time.
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GMAT 1: 690 Q44 V40
09 Nov 2022, 01:43
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Hi GMATNinja
LSAT 01, SEC III 18/26 69.23% 64min
LSAT 02, SEC I 22/28 79% 70min
LSAT 03, SEC II 24/27 88.88% 64min
LSAT 04, SEC IV 24/27 88.88% 70min
Thank you for the incredibly detailed study plan and your advise on using LSATs for practice. Its really helping me gain momentum reading topics that I don't really dig reading otherwise and also have a clear target to work towards.
My LSAT sets results are as above.
My concern is that I am getting all the Hard (40-50% on the gmat club meter) questions right but the majority of the ones I'm getting wrong show a 60-65% accuracy on the gmat club meter. I am worried because the test is adaptive and every medium level question I get wrong will make my chances of encountering a hard level question slimmer right?? So what's the point of me getting those right!?
Second, how many medium level questions can a person aiming for 740+ skip or get wrong?
Third, do I even need to pay attention to these aspects or just move on, since I am seeing an above 80% average on the practice sets?
Sharing below as an example, a question I got wrong which shows 75% accuracy on the gmat club meter.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/anthropologi ... 86172.html
Q5. According to the passage, one way in which life history studies differ from life-passage studies is that life-history studies are
(A) Usually told in the subject’s native language.
(B) Less reliable because they rely solely on the subject’s recall.
(C) More likely to be told without the influence of an intermediary.
(D) More creative in the way they interpret the subject’s cultural legacy.
(E) More representative of the historian’s point of view than of the ethnographer’s.
I chose E over C; Reason, I failed to analyze the answer choices correctly.
Please read this section each week if you’re serious about optimizing your study time. Our goal is to help you understand how good or bad your results are, so that you can (A) choose your homework wisely, and (B) avoid wasting time reviewing questions that don’t really matter.
Obviously, some of this advice will be similar from week to week. But plenty of things will change, too. So if you’re panicking about a homework result – or if you’re tempted to spend a half-billion hours reviewing individual questions – please take a deep breath, and read through this post first.
Most of you probably didn't do a practice test this week, and that's great. Generally speaking, your time is best spent elsewhere right now.
If you took a non-official quant test (from GMAT Club or another source):
Before you do anything else:
If your long-term goal is to score in the high 40s, here are the metrics I’d like you to hit in Week 2:
First, an unpleasant truth: you’re probably going to miss 20-50% of the quant questions on the GMAT, regardless of your score. The goal of an adaptive exam is to find the level of question at which you get roughly 40-50% of the questions wrong. So even if you score in the high 40s on quant, you’re going to miss A LOT of questions – that’s just how the test works.
Also, if you make careless mistakes on easier questions, the GMAT will eat you for breakfast. You probably already know that from watching this short video on time management though, right?
The punchline: when you study, please pick your battles wisely. If you’re painstakingly reviewing every single question you missed, you’re probably missing the point.
Yes, you’ll want to look for signs that your foundations are shaky, and you’ll also need to eliminate careless errors. But if you’re getting abused by hard or obscure questions? That’s cool. Don’t waste too much of your precious study time on that stuff.
Here’s some guidance on what to do once you’ve analyzed your results:
First, another unpleasant truth: LSAT sets are HARD. If you’re not in pain, you’re probably not doing it right.
Improving on RC and CR is usually a slow, agonizing process. Don’t get discouraged – keep fighting to read a little bit more sharply, every time you do a set. Keep fighting to be more consistent in how you approach sets. For most test-takers, improving on CR and RC is the hardest thing to accomplish, because there are no formulas or “tricks” that can help.
So please be patient with yourself, and be nice to yourself. Be proud when your results tick upwards a little bit, and don’t beat yourself up when you have a bad set. Slow, steady progress is beautiful. Even when it really hurts.
LSAT 01, SEC III 18/26 69.23% 64min
LSAT 02, SEC I 22/28 79% 70min
LSAT 03, SEC II 24/27 88.88% 64min
LSAT 04, SEC IV 24/27 88.88% 70min
Thank you for the incredibly detailed study plan and your advise on using LSATs for practice. Its really helping me gain momentum reading topics that I don't really dig reading otherwise and also have a clear target to work towards.
My LSAT sets results are as above.
My concern is that I am getting all the Hard (40-50% on the gmat club meter) questions right but the majority of the ones I'm getting wrong show a 60-65% accuracy on the gmat club meter. I am worried because the test is adaptive and every medium level question I get wrong will make my chances of encountering a hard level question slimmer right?? So what's the point of me getting those right!?
Second, how many medium level questions can a person aiming for 740+ skip or get wrong?
Third, do I even need to pay attention to these aspects or just move on, since I am seeing an above 80% average on the practice sets?
Sharing below as an example, a question I got wrong which shows 75% accuracy on the gmat club meter.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/anthropologi ... 86172.html
Q5. According to the passage, one way in which life history studies differ from life-passage studies is that life-history studies are
(A) Usually told in the subject’s native language.
(B) Less reliable because they rely solely on the subject’s recall.
(C) More likely to be told without the influence of an intermediary.
(D) More creative in the way they interpret the subject’s cultural legacy.
(E) More representative of the historian’s point of view than of the ethnographer’s.
I chose E over C; Reason, I failed to analyze the answer choices correctly.
GMATNinja
How to Interpret Your Week 1 Homework Results
Please read this section each week if you’re serious about optimizing your study time. Our goal is to help you understand how good or bad your results are, so that you can (A) choose your homework wisely, and (B) avoid wasting time reviewing questions that don’t really matter.
Obviously, some of this advice will be similar from week to week. But plenty of things will change, too. So if you’re panicking about a homework result – or if you’re tempted to spend a half-billion hours reviewing individual questions – please take a deep breath, and read through this post first.
Practice Tests+
Most of you probably didn't do a practice test this week, and that's great. Generally speaking, your time is best spent elsewhere right now.
If you took a non-official quant test (from GMAT Club or another source):
- Hopefully it didn't replace something that you needed more than a quant practice test. It was listed as optional – and as always, we want you to use your time wisely.
- Don't overreact to the score. It's nearly impossible for non-official practice tests to mimic the actual scoring of the GMAT, so the score itself doesn't matter much.
- Count your careless errors. No, really: please count them. In the long run, you’ll need to completely eliminate those careless errors on quant – and nothing else matters until you do.
- Count the number of questions that took 3+ minutes. In the long run, there should be none of these; this time management video might help a bit if you haven't already seen it.
- Don’t spend a ton of time reviewing every question you missed. We’ll say more about that in the quant section below.
Quant+
Benchmarks for Your Week 2 Quant Results
Before you do anything else:
- Count the errors that make you go "whoa, how the 🤬 did I miss THAT one?!?" No really: count them, for EVERY quant set you completed. Then divide that by the total number of questions to get your careless error rate.
If your long-term goal is to score in the high 40s, here are the metrics I’d like you to hit in Week 2:
- Careless error rate: < 5%. If you make careless errors on 5% of questions now, you’ll make far more under the pressure of the actual exam – maybe three times as many, which means that you’d make about 5 goofy errors on your actual test. And that will destroy your score. So please get this careless error rate down to 1-2% at most.
- OG & Quant Guide sets (#1-3 on the list): 85-90% correct is excellent, 80% is probably good. Just remember that WHAT you miss is more important on the GMAT than how many you missed: careless errors are apocalyptic. If you missed OG questions on topics that you haven't studied, that's totally cool -- you'll have time to learn those things.
- Randomized batches of forum questions (#4-8 on the list): 85-90% correct is good on the sub-600 questions, but if you did mixed difficulty sets, you’ll have to take the results with a grain of salt. If you happened to see nasty, strange questions, 50-60% might be pretty good. Don’t overreact if the percentage wasn’t great, though.
- Speed: On the OG and topic-based sets, you're in good shape if you’re reasonably close to 2 minutes per question. If you're slower than, say, 2:30 per question on average, it might be a sign that your basic skills are rusty, or that you're not choosing efficient paths forward -- and you'll be able to improve those things over time.
What Should You Do About Your Quant Weaknesses in Week 2?
First, an unpleasant truth: you’re probably going to miss 20-50% of the quant questions on the GMAT, regardless of your score. The goal of an adaptive exam is to find the level of question at which you get roughly 40-50% of the questions wrong. So even if you score in the high 40s on quant, you’re going to miss A LOT of questions – that’s just how the test works.
Also, if you make careless mistakes on easier questions, the GMAT will eat you for breakfast. You probably already know that from watching this short video on time management though, right?
The punchline: when you study, please pick your battles wisely. If you’re painstakingly reviewing every single question you missed, you’re probably missing the point.
Yes, you’ll want to look for signs that your foundations are shaky, and you’ll also need to eliminate careless errors. But if you’re getting abused by hard or obscure questions? That’s cool. Don’t waste too much of your precious study time on that stuff.
Here’s some guidance on what to do once you’ve analyzed your results:
- If your careless error rate is too high: address this problem ASAP. Nothing else matters on quant until you do. Check out the resource list in the study plan for help.
- If you struggled on specific topics (algebra, geometry, exponents), don’t panic. It’s far too easy to overreact to a few errors, and study these problems until your eyeballs burst. Instead, try to put your struggles in context: did you miss particularly hard or strange versions of these questions? Were your errors careless? If so, you probably don’t need to do much studying, exactly. But if you missed basic questions because your foundations are shaky, then you might need to do some remedial studying, and it might even make sense to “pause” the study plan to do so – but don’t assume that you need to do this unless the data is very, very clear about your weaknesses.
- If you struggled on the OG or Quant Guide sets: don’t panic. Again: ask yourself WHY you struggled. If you’re at, say, 70-80% accuracy, that’s not ideal right now. But context matters: if mosts of those errors are on topics you’ve never really studied, you’re in great shape, since you have plenty of time to learn those in the next 11 weeks.
- If you got CRUSHED by ALL of the quant homework: if you’re nowhere close to the benchmarks on quant – and if your long-term goal is a high-40s score – then maybe you need to back away from the study plan, and invest some time in rebuilding your basic quant skills. If that’s the case for you, tag us in the thread, give us as much detail as you can about your situation, and we’ll try to help.
- How much time should you spend reviewing individual quant questions? Not much, please! Because it can take SOOOOOOO much time to review a question, it should be your absolute last resort. That’s why we want you to redo questions first – sometimes, you’ll see your mistake right away, and that’s the best way to learn. If you miss a question a second time, then maybe it’s a sign of an underlying issue.
- No, really: resist the temptation to obsess over individual questions. Instead, look for patterns in your errors – an error on one question might be a fluke (or a weird, hard, or badly written question), but if you miss several related questions, you have an opportunity to get a good ROI on your study time by addressing a general weakness via a video or articles or books.
Verbal+
First, another unpleasant truth: LSAT sets are HARD. If you’re not in pain, you’re probably not doing it right.
Improving on RC and CR is usually a slow, agonizing process. Don’t get discouraged – keep fighting to read a little bit more sharply, every time you do a set. Keep fighting to be more consistent in how you approach sets. For most test-takers, improving on CR and RC is the hardest thing to accomplish, because there are no formulas or “tricks” that can help.
So please be patient with yourself, and be nice to yourself. Be proud when your results tick upwards a little bit, and don’t beat yourself up when you have a bad set. Slow, steady progress is beautiful. Even when it really hurts.
Benchmarks for Your Week 2 Verbal Results
- Accuracy on LSAT CR & RC sets: if your goal is a 40V or above, we eventually want to see 80% accuracy on LSAT CR and RC. That’s your long-run goal. It’s OK if you’re not quite there in Week 2.
- Efficiency on LSAT CR & RC sets: in the long run, you’ll need to complete full LSAT sets in under 60 minutes to have a shot at finishing the GMAT verbal section on time. If you’re in the 60-70 minute range right now, that’s still OK – you have time to become more efficient and energetic in your approach. If you’re slower than that, we might be worried. More on that below.
- Consistency on LSAT CR & RC sets: your errors and times should fall within a fairly narrow range across ALL of your LSAT sets. LSAT sets (~25 Qs each) do not vary much in difficulty, so if your errors or times fluctuate wildly, that’s a sign that you’re doing very different things at different times – and that’s not cool. You’ll certainly struggle more on some passages than others, but the results on the full sets of ~25 questions should be pretty stable.
- GMAT OG & Verbal Guide RC & CR questions: we can’t give you a benchmark, because it just depends on the difficulty level of the questions that you happened to do. All I can say is that you’ll want to look for HUGE patterns in your mistakes: are science passages freaking you out? Are you overwhelmingly missing a certain question type? If the patterns are CLEAR, they’re worth addressing, but don’t overreact to a question or two.
What Should You Do About Your Verbal Weaknesses in Week 2?
- Don’t panic. CR and RC progress can be slow. Take a long view: are you seeing ANY improvement in your average accuracy and times from Week 1 until now? If so, great – even if that improvement is small.
- Look for “careless” errors. As with everything on the GMAT, pay close attention to anything that seemed to be an “unforced error.” Did you miss a ton of questions that felt easy to you? If so, you might want to revisit the techniques in the videos and articles in the assignment list.
- If your results are significantly better on RC than on CR: that’s not a bad thing! There’s no reason why you can’t bring your CR results to the level of your RC, but something is funky in your approach to CR. In the coming weeks, you might want to invest time in some extra CR sets or videos – we’ll provide recommendations each week.
- If you’re better at CR than RC: again, this isn’t a bad thing! You can bring your RC up to the level of your CR. When this happens, the most common reasons are that you’re obsessing over details when you read RC (and missing the “big picture” by doing so), or you’re struggling to stay focused through a long passage. Maybe you’ll want to err on the side of getting a bit of extra practice on RC in the coming weeks, and we’ll keep feeding you videos that might help.
- If you’re slow ( > 60 mins per LSAT set): well, I wish that I could tell you exactly what’s happening, but there are a ton of different reasons why your times might be high. At this stage, maybe you’re still learning new approaches, so you’re still figuring out how to integrate them into your process – if that’s the case, your times will come down. Maybe you’re not doing each set with test-like intensity. Maybe there’s inefficiency in your process – and if that’s the case, it’s likely that you’re still struggling to fully incorporate the techniques that you’ll see in the videos. It’s also possible that you’re a slow reader, and that’s a hard thing to fix. I wish I could tell you which of these things is happening – but you’ll have to figure that part out for yourself, unfortunately.
- If you’re getting impatient with your results: hey, it’s Week 2. If you’re above 80% on your LSAT sets, you’re doing GREAT. If you’re in the 60-80% range, you still have time to improve.
- If you’re getting CRUSHED on CR & RC: my heart hurts for you, because that’s a terrible feeling. If your goal is something like a 30V or a 35V, our benchmarks are too aggressive – so 60% or below on your LSAT sets might not be too bad. But if you have ambitious goals (40V+) and you’re truly struggling to understand the passages, it’s possible that you need to spend some time working on your fundamental reading skills before returning to GMAT-specific verbal prep. This article and this one will give you some ideas for how to improve your reading precision over time.
