GMAT Ninja Study Plan Week 5

• Quant section score: I don’t care, and you shouldn’t either. Non-official tests aren’t necessarily very accurate. Instead, focus on the next two metrics…
• Careless error rate: < 3%. If you made one silly error, that’s OK. More than that? Grrrrrr…
• Questions that took you 3+ minutes: < 3%. Didn’t you hear our guy Mike telling you to “bail when you flail”?

• Don’t overreact to non-official test scores! It's nearly impossible for practice tests to mimic the actual scoring of the GMAT, so the score itself doesn't matter much.
• If you’re making careless errors: As always, job #1 is to stamp them out. Check out the resource list in the study plan for help.
• If you spent 3+ minutes on too many questions: This is an issue of discipline and mindset. Learn to let go! Remember: the test is designed to make you miss 30-50% of the questions, and most of you will do exactly that – even if you get a GREAT quant score. So dump the perfectionism, and learn to let questions go.
• Again: don’t spend a ton of time reviewing your mistakes. Reviewing individual questions can drain too much of your precious study time. If a question was hard or weird, then it isn’t the biggest threat to your GMAT goals. So please don’t obsess over individual questions – especially non-official ones.

Benchmarks for Your Week 5 Quant Results

• 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.

• Careless error rate: < 2%. You’ve heard this for more than a month now: the careless errors need to be gone, or almost gone.
• OG & Quant Guide sets (#2-4 on the list): 80-90% correct is excellent, 70-80% is still fine, since these are getting harder. Just remember that WHAT you miss is more important on the GMAT than how many you missed. Careless errors are apocalyptic, but if you missed OG questions on topics that you haven't studied, that's totally cool -- you'll have time to learn those things.
• Rates questions (#6-7 on the list): 80-90% correct is great 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. The quality and difficulty of rates questions can vary enormously, so don’t overreact to your results.
• Other randomized batches of questions (#8-10 on the list): same as above: 80-90% is good on sub-600 questions, but take the results of mixed-difficulty sets with a HUGE grain of salt.
• 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 skills are shaky, or that you're not choosing efficient paths forward.

What Should You Do About Your Quant Weaknesses in Week 5?

• If your careless error rate is too high: that’s bad. Do whatever you need to do to fix this. Do it now. Pause the study plan if you need to. Just fix the careless errors.
• If you struggled on the OG or Quant Guide sets (items #2-4): as usual, ask yourself WHY you struggled. If you’re at, say, 70% accuracy, that’s not ideal, but context matters: if nearly all of those errors are on topics that you’ve never really studied, you’re in great shape, since you have plenty of time to study those over the next month or two.
• If you struggled on the rates sets (items #6-7): concentrate on putting your errors into context, and look for broad patterns. Rates questions can be weird: if you missed really hard ones or oddball questions, please don’t waste your time reviewing them. If you got CRUSHED on easier rates questions, you might want to revisit the videos in the study list, but don’t overreact – rates questions are less than 5% of the total, and not worth THAT much time.
• If you struggled on other topic-based sets (items #8-10): again, concentrate on putting your errors into context, and look for broad patterns. If you make similar errors on several questions, then it’s time to buckle down and figure out what needs to be fixed in your approach. But if you missed hard or strange questions, who cares?
• 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.

Benchmarks for Your Week 5 RC & CR Results

• Accuracy on LSAT CR & RC sets: 80% is the long-run goal if you’re shooting for a 40V or above. It’s still totally OK if you’re not quite there in Week 4.
• Efficiency on LSAT CR & RC sets: 60 minutes or less is your long-run goal. Again, it’s OK if you’re not quite there in Week 4, but you should be close by now.
• 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 you might need to work on your approach to questions.
• Random sets of paradox/discrepancy questions from the older OGs: sorry, we can’t really give you a benchmark for these, since randomness plays a role. Maybe you saw tougher questions, and maybe not. Did you at least feel confident and systematic in your approach? If so, you’re probably fine.
• Verbal Guide RC set: 85-90% in no more than 2 minutes per question, since this is a fairly easy set. These Verbal Guide and OG sets will get harder in the coming weeks, so don’t be alarmed if your results are somewhat flat over time.
• OG CR set: 80%+ in roughly 2 minutes per question is a good result. This set isn’t so easy, now that you’re deeper in the OG.

What Should You Do About Your CR & RC Weaknesses in Week 5?

• Look at Week 1 for signs of progress. Are you seeing ANY improvement in your average accuracy and times from Week 1 until now? If you’ve reduced your LSAT CR and RC errors by 5-10%, that’s legitimately a great achievement, and you’re very much on track.
• Look for “careless” errors. As with everything on the GMAT, pay close attention to anything that seems to be an “unforced error.” Did you miss a ton of questions that felt easy to you, especially in the OG and Verbal Guide? If so, you might want to revisit the techniques in the videos and articles in the assignment lists. This is MUCH more important than getting better at harder questions.
• If your results are significantly better on RC than on CR: you might want to invest time in some extra CR sets or videos – we’ll provide some recommendations each week.
• If you’re better at CR than RC: 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, too.
• If you’re slow ( > 60 mins per LSAT set, > 2 minutes per OG or Verbal Guide question): sadly, 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 you need more coffee or more sleep. Maybe you’d be sharper at a different time of day. 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 still only Week 5. If you’re hitting our benchmarks, you’re doing GREAT. If you’re not quite hitting the marks yet, are you at least seeing some improvement? If so, you’re on track – keep at it! And remember that you can always pause the study plan if you need to.
• If you’re getting CRUSHED on CR & RC: If your goal is something like a 30V or a 35V, then our benchmarks are too aggressive – so 60% or below on your LSAT sets (or maybe 70% or below in aggregate on the Week 5 OG & Verbal Guide sets) might not be too bad. But if you have ambitious verbal 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.

Benchmarks for Your Week 5 SC Results

• Accuracy: 90% correct is cause for celebration, and 70-90% is still completely solid. If you’re under 70%, don’t worry – there’s plenty of time to improve.
• Random sets of parallelism questions from the older OGs: sorry, we can’t really give you a benchmark for these, since randomness plays a role. Maybe you saw tougher questions, and maybe not. Did you at least feel confident and systematic in your approach to parallelism? If so, you’re probably fine.
• Speed: if you completed the set of 25 questions in under 50 minutes, that’s great. If you were in the 50-60 minute range, you’ll eventually need to get more efficient, but you have plenty of time to do so. If the set took you more than an hour, don’t panic – just be aware that you might have extra work to do as you strive for efficiency.

What Should You Do About Your SC Weaknesses in Week 5?

• Be prepared to spend more time in the coming weeks if you’re struggling. If your SC is lagging way behind your quant, CR, and RC skills then you’ll want to allocate more time for SC (particularly the optional videos) in the next few weeks…
• ...but please don’t spend your time reviewing individual SC questions. It’s incredibly time-consuming, and every SC question has its own unique qualities that you might not ever see again. Instead, be patient – you’ll have plenty of chances to build your underlying skills via videos and more practice, and that’s a better use of time than obsessing over individual questions.