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GMAT Ninja’s 13-Week Study Plan
Week 5 (~15 hours)
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Welcome back for Week 5 of the study plan! If you have no idea what’s going on here, then you’ll want to start with Week 1 instead.
(A) Inspiration & Advice (optional)+
Vinayak’s journey from a 610 to a 730, featuring SIX attempts in two years.
There’s some great wisdom in this one:
Quote:
In other words, you can't just bash your face off the wall, trying to learn every concept imaginable. Pick your battles wisely, friends – but keep fighting.
(B) Getting Ready for Test Day ( < 30 mins.)+
You’re roughly ⅓ of the way through the study plan, and you’ll want to continue thinking about how to maximize your test-day performance.
The time investment here is small, so these videos are worth a peek for most of you:
- You’ve already seen this video on time management, but if you want to watch a sequel, check out this video on 6 GMAT time management myths that you should never buy into (12 mins).
- (Optional) If you’re struggling with verbal and you’re trying to figure out whether there’s hope, you might want to check out this video on the four factors that can hold your score back on verbal (6 minutes). If verbal is going fine, please don’t spend your time on it.
(C) Quant (~4-7 hrs.)+
Goals for the Week 5 quant homework:
- 1. Improve your skills on work/rate problems – and by extension, word problems in general. But the quant topics are becoming less crucial now. You won’t see all that many work/rate problems on your actual exam – they’re worth studying, but they aren’t worth THAT much time.
2. Continue to add flexibility to your quant toolset.
3. Pick battles wisely on practice tests.
4. By now, the score-killing silly errors are GONE… right?
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.
Week 5 quant homework
Friendly reminder: pick your battles wisely. If you need extra reps on quant (but not verbal), great – tackle extra sets from items #6-10, or possibly extra videos. If you’re doing relatively well on quant, spend extra time on verbal instead.
- 1. (Optional) Watch one (not both!) of these, skipping ahead as needed to preserve your time and sanity:
- A. 2022 video series: Rates & Conversions I (~1 hr.) | Funkier Rate Problems (~1 hr.) (23 mins)
B. Older live video: Rate Problems, Age Problems, & Beyond (~1 hr.)
3. GMAT OG PS #76-100
4. 4th set of 25 DS questions from the GMAT OG (the exact question numbers will vary depending on which edition you’re using)
5. Quant section only from the GMAT Club tests or another NON-official source (save the mba.com exams for later)
6. Do 15 rates PS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
7. Do 15 rates DS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
8. (Optional) Do 15 word problems PS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
9. (Optional) Do 15 word problems DS questions. Sub-600 level | Mixed difficulty
10. (Optional) Only if you’re CERTAIN that it’s worthwhile: do extra sets of topic-based questions as needed (algebra, exponents, geometry, word problems, percents, ratios, rates).
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 the content this week, 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 feeling inefficient, the video on developing a flexible quant mindset is probably a good fit.
3. If you’re struggling with the fundamental content this week, check out these videos on Rates & Conversions, Funkier Rate Problems, Rate Problems, Age Problems, & Beyond, or word translations in general. If quant topics from previous weeks are giving you trouble, whatever you need is probably in this playlist.
4. GMAT Club Math Book
5. Heroic quant threads from Bunuel: Ultimate GMAT Quant Megathread | Signature Question Collection | All You Need for Quant
(D) Reading Comprehension (2-3 hrs.)+
We’re getting to the end of the RC lessons now. We’ll give you one more video this week on the hardest RC passages, and then it’s just practice from here.
Also, LSAT RC sets will be optional after this week, and you’ll see more GMAT RC sets. But whenever you feel unsure about your progress on RC, do an LSAT set, and compare it to your results from Weeks 1-3. That data is often a priceless reality-check or confidence-booster.
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. (We’ll say more below about how to analyze your results.)
Week 5 RC homework
- 1. (Optional) Watch one last video on really hard GMAT RC passages or this older video on how to go from good (V40?) to GREAT (V45?) on RC... but it won’t be fun to watch both.
2. One full LSAT RC set
3. Do the first set of ~25 questions from a recent edition of the Verbal Guide (skinny little book). (The question numbers will vary depending on which edition you’re using, and it’s OK to do a little bit more or fewer than 25 questions so that you don’t stop partway into a passage.) Again, these will feel MUCH easier than the LSAT.
4. (Optional) One more LSAT RC set
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 (like humanities/culture/literature)? 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, say, three or more questions on a particular 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 your RC homework sets this week, here are some resources that might help:
(E) Critical Reasoning (~2 hrs.)+
This week, we’ll offer some resources on paradox/discrepancy questions. But don’t force it -- if your general process on CR is rock-solid, you don’t really need to drill specific question types at all.
Similarly, if CR is going well for you already, feel free to do just one of the full CR sets. Just make sure that your decision is rooted in data, and not just how you feel when you do the questions.
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. (We’ll say more below about how to analyze your results.)
Week 5 CR homework
- 1. (Optional) If you want extra reps with CR paradox/discrepancy questions, do a set of 5-10 from the LSAT or older editions of the OGs; you can find some from OG 12 and the Verbal 2nd edition here or from the LSAT here.
2. Do the 2nd set of 25 questions from a recent edition of the GMAT Official Guide. These will still feel easier than the LSAT. (The CR question numbers will vary slightly, depending on which edition you’re using.)
3. One full LSAT CR set
4. (Very optional) One additional LSAT CR set
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 your CR homework sets this week, here are some resources that might help:
- If paradox questions are giving you trouble, they’re briefly discussed in this video, particularly the 1st and 5th questions.
- Beginners’ guide to CR
- YouTube video on how to approach CR
- All GMAT Ninja CR resources
- More full CR explanations than anybody should ever read
- A whole lot more YouTube videos
(F) Sentence Correction (~2 hrs.)+
This week, we’ll pick on parallelism, which is one of the thornier SC subjects. It has plenty of nuance to it, so if you’re not immediately AMAZING at parallelism, that’s totally normal. It takes time, so be patient with yourself.
Usual disclaimer: there’s a limited supply of SC questions, so don’t race ahead. We’ll get to everything – both practice questions and every major SC topic area – in the coming weeks.
Week 5 SC assignments:
- 1. Watch one (not both!) of these parallelism series, skipping ahead as needed to preserve your time and sanity:
- A. 2022 video series: video 1 (20 mins) | video 2 (23 mins) | video 3 (26 mins)
B. Older live videos: video 1 (63 mins) | video 2 (46 mins)
3. Do the 2nd set of 25 SC questions from the GMAT Official Guide (the exact question numbers will vary depending on which edition you’re using)
Need more SC help?
It’s still early, so please don’t go crazy watching extra videos or reading piles of extra articles yet – many of these same resources will appear later in the study plan. But in case you need them, here are links to more SC resources than you’ll probably ever need:
(G) 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.
15 Nov 2022, 10:00
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How to Interpret Your Week 5 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+
Benchmarks for the non-official quant test:
- 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”?
What to do about your Week 5 practice test results:
- 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.
Quant+
Benchmarks for Your Week 5 Quant Results
The first part is the same as in previous weeks:
- 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 5:
- 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?
Our usual reminder: on an adaptive test, job #1 is to be spectacularly accurate on the questions that you’re capable of getting right. If you’re taking care of business on the easier ones, you’ll get pounded by harder questions – and you’ll miss plenty of them. Embrace the pain.
In other words: don’t obsess over the hard stuff. It isn’t worth much of your precious time.
Here’s what to do once you’ve analyzed your results:
- 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.
CR & RC+
Our usual disclaimer: 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. Be proud when your results tick upwards a little bit, and keep fighting.
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.
SC+
We only assigned one SC set again this week, so the most important thing is not to overreact. We’re starting to make headway on key SC topics, but there are plenty more to come. So please please don’t obsess over individual questions yet – it’s STILL not the best use of your 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.
25 Jan 2023, 20:31
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Hi GMATNinja. Hope you are doing fine. I just have a question. Upto week 3 in CR we did only LSAT sets. In the 4th week,we did first 25 CR questions from verbal OG. Here in week 5 we are told to do the 3rd 25 set of CR questions from main OG. We did not do first 50 CR questions from the main OG. Should we skip the first 50 questions from main OG or it should have been first 25 set of questions from the main OG guide?
)
