90% accuracy rate for GMAT Official Guide easy questions

Hi! 90% is a very good accuracy rate even for easy questions, especially since you are just about embarking upon your preparation.

This can only be good news for your endeavor to land on the right side of 700 on GMAT.

Good luck!

Hi funkyshah,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. I agree that it’s difficult to translate the accuracy of completing OG questions into an actual GMAT score, so first and foremost, you need to get an accurate baseline score. Thus, in short order, could you take an official MBA.com practice exam? Once you complete the exam, feel free to report back here with the score breakdown, and I can provide some further advice.

Also, you may find it helpful to read this article about How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT.

Good luck!

As EducationAisle pointed out, 90% is good, especially for someone who has just started preparing for the exam. The important thing to do here is to continue putting in effort.

Start incorporating a few of the more difficult questions into your practice sets, and maybe take an official practice test sometime. And if by "I don't have much time in hand" you mean that you need to take the actual GMAT exam soon, then you should definitely take an official practice test ASAP.

I took one of the 2 free tests from mba.com as Scott and AjiteshArun advised (please note that I did pause the test a few times). I got a 720. Here's the breakdown of my score:

Quant - 48 and
Verbal - 40.

As expected I struggled in DS in the quant section and most of the questions that I answered incorrectly were DS questions. In the problem solving section, I struggled with Probability and Combinatorics but that's because it's been many years since I last studied them. What's surprising is that I answered 11 questions incorrectly and yet received 48. I am really disappointed with my quant results because I thought this will be the easier of the 2 sections for me to crack.

In the verbal section, most of the mistakes I made were in Sentence Correction. This is odd because I thought I was better at SC than RC. I really struggled with timing in the Verbal section.

I am planning to take the GMAT by mid May. I have a very demanding job and this is the closest I have got to preparing for the GMAT (I have been studying everyday since the last 3 weeks). I want to study as efficiently as possible in the next 1.5 months focusing primarily on DS, SC and RC.

While these scores are encouraging, you must try not to pause your next test. This is especially important for your official practice (mba.com) tests. Those tests are the best practice tests you have, and there are only 6 of them. I think you should take one of the paid GMATPreps soon, within the next two weeks or so if you are looking to take the GMAT in May. Save practice test 2 for later.

That said, 720 with a few (how many? ) pauses is still a very good first score. Keep going.

Hi funkyshah,

I 100% agree with AjiteshArun, next time you take a practice test, DO NOT pause the test. The point of taking the practice test was to get an accurate baseline score. That said, assuming you did not pause the test too many times, 720 is a great start.

Rather than basing your study plan on such a small sample size of data from your practice exam, to improve from here, you really need to go through GMAT quant and verbal carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills. The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For example, if you find that you are not strong in answering Number Properties questions, then carefully review the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions and practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties: LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, remainders, etc. When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see and types that you would rather not see, and types of questions that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. Let’s say you are reviewing Critical Reasoning. Be sure that you practice a large number of Critical Reasoning questions: Strengthen and Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, find the Conclusion, Must be True, etc. As you go through the questions, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get correct. If you missed a Weaken question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize what the question was asking? Did you skip over a key detail in an answer choice? Getting GMAT verbal questions right is a matter of what you know, what you see, and what you do. So, any time that you don't get one right, you can seek to identify what you had to know to get the right answer, what you had to see that you didn't see, and what you could have done differently to arrive at the correct answer.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new quant and verbal materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant and verbal courses. You also may find my article with more information regarding
how to score a 700+ on the GMAT helpful.

Good luck!

Thank you so much Scott (for a useful detailed answer and for the links) and AjiteshArun! I will incorporate what you shared in my studies/practice. I generally do tend to spend more time in reviewing and analyzing the questions that I wasn't able to answer correctly and their answer choices. For example, in RC I have identified that my issues are psychological - I end up taking more time than I should to read the passage (because I have this notion in my head that if I don't understand the passage thoroughly then I won't be able to answer the questions correctly) and then panic because I am running out of time. I am slowly learning to focus on the structure of the passage, why a certain detail was included instead of obsessing over the details etc. I have also started reading the Scientific American and I try to apply the same principles while reading an article.

I have picked up Manhattan GMAT for Sentence Correction and I also try to solve 5 SC problems everyday from the Official GMAT.

As for quant, I have brushed up on most of the basic material and I am now focusing only on the topics that I struggle with.

Thanks again for all the advice and the useful links!

My pleasure! Good luck!