Advice for improving Arithmetic

Hi Mike,

You’re right, 5 weeks is not a lot of time to (re)master a whole field of mathematics (arithmetic). So your best option is probably to wisely choose two or three sub-topics of arithmetic that you can really make improvements on in that time period and work on mastering those. What those subfields are is going to depend on you. I saw you posted back in February that you’ve been working with EMPOWERgmat. Have you made it through most of their video course by now? If not, then I’d suggest you work on the topics you haven’t done yet, especially in arithmetic. Otherwise…

if there are any specific subtopics that, try as you might, you just totally don’t understand, especially if they are topics that aren’t frequently tested on the GMAT, it might be best just to decide it’s okay to get those problems wrong, and focus on where you think you can improve in five weeks. If you’re having problems finishing in time, identifying problems that you absolutely know you can’t do, guessing quickly and moving on can save you time for some of the tougher problems that you might be able to get with an extra 15 seconds or so.

I think there are threads on here about what topics are tested most frequently. You might want to scan one of those lists (or maybe someone here can tell you?) and pick some of those things to work on. E.g. if you have problems with absolute value, that’s tested a lot. Then if you identify a specific frequent problem type you want to work on, you can do problems on that specifically with something like the Kaplan Math Workbook. The word problems (like work problems) are considered as a separate category from arithmetic, so if you’re doing okay on the work problems, I’d leave them alone and focus more on number properties/operations with rational numbers.

At the 700 level, a lot of what the GMAT is testing is not just knowing a set of math facts, but having good number sense/intuition - your ability to see the neat trick or pattern that will make something that seems like a really ugly arithmetic calculation easy to do. And that’s something that’s harder to learn, especially in a short period of time. If you don’t already feel solid on number properties, divisibilities, tricks for multiplying and dividing ugly numbers quickly, it might be most beneficial to you to work on learning those rules or guidelines over the next few weeks. Then just spend the rest of your time practicing a lot. Add bills in your head when you go to the grocery store. Practice multiplying and dividing lots of numbers. The more you do it, the more you’ll begin to see the patterns that will make you be faster.

If you’ve been keeping an error log, you could also try going back to some of the arithmetic problems you have gotten wrong in the past, and try to redo them. Try to redo them in multiple ways. Try to see if there’s some pattern or trick you missed the first time.