focus on one topic vs try random topics every day

Also, as an additional questions, in 3 hours how many topics should I cover? should those be completely unrelated? (if such thing exists on GMAT) like geometry, multiples, probabilities for ex.

Thank you!

Dear iliavko,

I'm happy to respond. My friend, thank you for providing more background. Now, this makes more sense.

A few more concrete suggestion---the biggest is as follows. In no part of your life should you ever touch a calculator. You need to practice mental math 24/7. Add, subtract, multiply, and divide in your head every day. Get a friend to hold a calculator, and have that friend quiz you and use the calculator to check your answers. Make it your active goal to discover new patterns with numbers---this is what people who love numbers do all the time. Estimate all the time---estimate distances, areas, times, prices, weights, etc. Approximately how much weight does a barrel of water have? How much water would fit into your local supermarket, if you could seal it off and fill it from floor to ceiling? Be hungry for opportunities to look for math around you in your everyday life!

See this blog:
How to Study for GMAT Math
Every link in that blog will be something relevant to you. In particular, read the one on number sense, and every single day play the "number sense game" described in that blog. You have to get so comfortable with numbers that you actually have fun playing with them.

This is a really important point now. My friend, I don't know whether you are familiar with the "habits of excellence." I want you to observe something. I spoke of how important an error log would be and gave a link discussing one. Then you said, Oh, I already have an error log, but it's not that helpful. Don't you see? Can you see what you are doing to yourself? The thing you are calling an "error log" is not serving its proper function. I don't know what you are doing, or how you are doing it, but this tells me that what you are doing right now doesn't even deserve the name "error log." Let's call what you have right now a "proto error log"---certainly there are aspects of this that will serve in the next level version. Until you have something that is actively preventing you from making mistake time and time again, you do not have something that merits the name "error log"! Read the link I sent and search on the web for more. Make it your goal to make the more effective possible error log, the best error log that any student has ever created. Do not tolerate mediocrity in any part of your studies.
Here's a big recommendation on error logs. For each problem you get wrong, diagnose the mistake by yourself, with the OE---that's step #1. Then, for step #2, come to GMAT Club, search for a pre-existent thread on that problem (start a new thread only if you can't find the problem at all); give a detailed explanation of what you do, your understanding of the mistake and what you think the correct way to think about it is, and then ask the experts--what else do I need to understand about this problem? You need to ask an excellent question. You are more than welcome to solicit my input on any problem of that sort, and of course, Bunuel the genius is the great master teacher in math. Step #3, once you get the additional insights from experts, write all this into your personal error log. You see, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "We do not know what we do not know." When you get a problem wrong, always assume there are dimensions of problem solving and problem analysis that you don't even see and that the official explanation may not make clear to you. Make it your default assumption that you need outside expert input to get to the next level with any mistake.

You see, this is all part of the attitude of excellence. It's the attitude of mediocrity to say, "OK, I've already done that, but it wasn't that helpful" ---in other word, "Been there, done that, because I don't want to have to put any more effort into thinking about that" ---that's all part of the mindset of mediocrity. It's the attitude of excellence to say, "What else can I do? How can I make this aspect of my preparation the most effective possible version of what it does? How can I get the absolute most from myself?"

My friend, you started from zero, and you want to get to an elite score. I know you've been working for a while, but you still have a long way to go. You can take absolutely nothing about this for granted. If you try to phone this in, in any way, then you will not hit your target. You have to prepare as if your life itself were in the balance. You have to prepare as if you have to get the highest Q score that anyone has ever achieved on the GMAT. You have to pull out every stop and commit yourself to this in a way that you have never committed yourself to anything before. Whatever you think you maximum possible dedication is, you have to outdo that.

Finally, in three hours, here's what I recommend. Take 60-90 mins to do depth review and focused practice on one topic, a different topic each day. That's notes, recordings of your summaries, practice problems with entries in error logs, the whole shebang on one topic. That focus time is 60-90 mins, and the remaining time, 90 - 120 mins, is devoted to mixed practice. Thus, if in that time, you do, say 25 practice questions, you may see as many as 25 different topics. Once again, if all you have are single-topic batches of questions, then you simply don't have enough. Especially to make the kinds of strides you want to make, you need to do mixed practiced every day. If you don't use it already, Magoosh is essentially an unlimited source of mixed-practice practice problems---about the same price as any large book, and much higher quality that just about any book you could buy. Also, my lessons with give you a depth of understanding of each topic that you may not get on your own. Here's a sample lesson:
Multiples
Here's a sample PS:
91!−90!
Here's a sample DS:
Square and Triangle
When you submit your answer for either question, the next page will have a complete video explanation. Each one of our 500+ math practice questions has its own VE---that kind of immediate feedback will accelerate your learning.

My friend, please let me know if you have any questions on what I've said. Best of luck!

Mike

hi mikemcgarry

Thank you a lot for your advice

I would like to ask for your opinion on something. https://gmatclub.com/forum/a-girl-scout ... 04077.html
this word problem. It took me 10 minutes to solve it (wrong) and when I saw the solution I realized it can be done in 20 sec. Fine. The thing is, it may seem that I can learn something from this problem but in my opinion I can't . There is nothing to learn here, since this problem relies on your ability to "see" numbers. You just see it or you don't. Yes you can write down that "next time check if can round the numbers" but in my onion its a useless thing to write down since your "checklist of things to detect when checking a problem" would have 1000 items on it.

Actually I realized straight away that I should round the numbers. But I didn't do it correctly and I still missed the problem.

Is a high GMAT score only accessible for those who have years of math practice? In my opinion only years of practice, not the "100 hours" according to GMAC, can give you the "vision" to see the different relations between numbers by just glancing at the problem and how to manipulate those numbers.

Another one (just got it wrong too)
https://gmatclub.com/forum/at-a-certain ... 33475.html
I didn't understand the language and only got it after seeing the solution. what can I do here? In my opinion nothing because there is nothing to learn from my mistake. "read the problem carefully" is not a learning point in my opinion.

Would you agree on this? Please look at this from the perspective of someone who didn't know any maths a year ago.

Thank you!

Dear iliavko,

I'm happy to respond.

Let's talk about the Girl Scout problem first of all. There are a few learning you might take away from this.

Point #1: if a problem looks as if it will be a long and hairy calculation, look at the answer choices. If the answer choices are all close together, you need to do a precise calculation, but if the answer choices are spread wide apart, you can estimate. This problem is absolutely BEGGING for estimation. Gigantic ugly number in the prompt and answer choices that are miles apart—that's the kind of scenario for which the estimation strategy was designed.
I looked at this problem and thought—OK, gigantic soccer fields from one answer choice to the next. Let's estimate. If plain & chocolate chip are equal in number, # of boxes equals price in dollars. Since these two numbers are very close, plain has to be close to half of the total. Only (E) is close to half of the total.

It is very very important to practice estimation so you are always reading to use that skill. I don't know how you rounded. I would say 15/2 = 7.5, so 1500/2 = 750. That's rounding that gets you close enough to the answer. This is why daily practice with mental math is so important.

Point #2: this problem is a little unwieldy for an exact calculation, but in this scenario (two items, two different prices, total price, how much of each item), there are easier and harder ways to approach it.
Let's change the problem slightly, to simplify. Let's say Box A still costs $0.75 and Box B costs $1.25. We have 2000 boxes total, and the price is $2010. How many Box B's? Let's say the answer choices are close together now, so we can't simply estimate.

One way is the old-fashioned to assign variables, set up simultaneous equations, etc. That may well have been the approach that you used in the original problem, because it would take several minutes. This is often a more time-consuming approach.

Another way to think about this is as follows. One plain ($0.75 each) and one choc. chip ($1.25) is $2 for two boxes. Multiply that by 1000—a thousand of each box would be exactly $2000. Now, what happens if we remove a Box A, and replace it with a Box B? We lose $0.75 and gain $1.25, a net gain of $0.50. Each time we take out a Box A and put in a Box B, we keep the total number of boxes the same, but the price goes up by $0.50. How many times would we have to do that individual swap to raise the price from $2000 even to $2010? Well, $0.50 goes into $10 twenty times, so we had to do that swap twenty times to get the price up to $2010. This means:
Number of Box A = 1000 – 20 = 980
Number of Box B = 1000 + 20 = 1020

Play with this alternate way, the 1-by-1 gain/loss method, to think about two variables with two unknowns: it will help to build number sense to go back to problems you solved the other way and to solve them this way.

Now, for the carpet problem. This is a subtle point: you need only a high math grade, so you don't need to worry about the details of the GMAT Verbal section. Nevertheless, you absolutely cannot afford to do no practice on English! You need to push yourself to understand English better every day, if only so that you are not confused by the language on word problems. Once again, you can't afford to "mail in" any part of your studying, and high competency in English is absolutely essential to your goal. You can afford to take nothing for granted.

I will also say that whenever you see a rate of any kind, there's a very good chance that the solution will involve setting up a proportion. Even if you don't know what else to do, setting up a proportion would be an excellent start when you see a rate. Rates are ratios!

My friend, the 100 hrs of practice that GMAC announces on their website is for folks who already have a lot of basic math (e.g. what a fraction is) at their fingertips. It's 100 hrs to get from general comfort with math up to proficiency with the challenge of GMAT math. Now, you did NOT start at that same starting point. You started with the huge disadvantage of basically starting from almost nothing in your math understanding. I would estimate that more than 90% of people who begin studying for the GMAT begin with stronger math skills than you had at the beginning, and you are trying to get a final grade that is higher than more than 90% of people who take the GMAT. Understand what you are doing involves a truly massive challenge. Essentially, you are trying to jump from one side of the Bell Curve to the other! This is not ordinary improvement, the kind that most people on this site are seeking. This would be a 1-in-10000 kind of improvement. What you are trying to do is that extraordinary, so your effort has to be that extraordinary.

My friend, I am sorry to say that you are dreaming if you think 100 hrs will be enough for you—500 hrs might be closer! Between now and the GMAT, this needs to be your entire life. Don't watch any TV or play any video games: all that time is to study. Apologize to friends ahead of time: you have to go into isolation and make yourself a hermit to study math for a couple months. Study math at all your meals. You need to devote every ounce of your attention to achieving this. You need to study math so much that you are dreaming it almost every night. What you lacked in your initial preparation you have to make up in terms of your drive, your dedication, and your excellence. To jump from one side of the Bell Curve to the other, you basically have to have more drive and determination than anyone else in the world taking the GMAT right now. That's what it is going to take to be successful.

If you are really serious about this, you need to commit to this 100% percent and throw yourself into it fully without hesitation. Any wavering, any doubts about "do I really want to work this hard?" are essentially already a decision not to go for it.

Does all this make sense?
Mike

Hi mikemcgarry

Thank you so much for your reply!

Yeah I guess Im pretty much doomed here. I cant get one single word problem right. And I understand what the problem wants but I just cant do it in 2 min. Maybe in 5 or 10. Then I get many doubts on how to cancel out fractions for ex, basic stuff that I thought I had covered. I guess there are no miracles So far I spent around 1500 hours on gmat maybe 2000+ and I I don't see how I can improve from 44 to 48 in just 7 weeks with some 12 hours a week of study. I simply dont have more time and honestly it seems the more I study the less I know.

Maybe a burnout?..

Do you think private tutoring would help?

I just dont see how someone can teach me in 10 hours (because I cant afford more) something I couldnt learn in 2000h.

What do you think on this?

Dear iliavko,

I'm happy to respond.

My friend, private tutoring may help. If you find a particularly effective teacher, then that person might be able to isolate a few things you are doing that could be big difference-makers. You see, when a tutor is actually watching you think through a problem, watching your stops & starts, that person sees deeper patterns that don't come across in what you say. What a good tutor can do, a few sessions, can be remarkable, because it may be for that 2000 hrs you were doing something or not doing something that was off your radar, and just getting information about that could change everything.

Does all this make sense?
Mike

Great post. Thanks.