Quant: How to improve on +700 level Questions?

Question

Hi everyone,

I've been preparing for a while, and feel I'm prepared to take the exam. But as many of you I am awaiting for the exam to come back to normal - I won't give the online a try.

So, I've been getting good grade in official mocks (710,710,750) in my last attempts, and I'm currently taking daily small mock tests in E-gmat platform, both for Quant and Verbal.

I'm very confident with my verbal level - an accuracy of almost 90% in medium questions and 80% in the hard ones (+700).

But for Quant it seems that I've reached a plateau. I have a very good accuracy in medium level question - almost 90% - but a very bad accuracy in hard questions (less than 60% in some topics). Also, I've never had a grade in an official mock test higher than Q49, Q49 was in fact my last three marks in the official mocks, so my evolution was totally on Verbal side, going from V36 to V42.

I've been constantly executing the cycle mock test + review + error log for both Quant and Verbal, but while for Verbal the mistakes are each time less frequent, for Quant my accuracy seems to be stuck.

What should be the best approach? Should I go back to the basic concepts? Or focus on each topic by time? Or just keep doing what I'm doing?

Appreciate any opinion!

TheUltimateWinner · Answer

lcbdelgado I have no idea what suggestion i'll put for you here, but it seems that you should brush up your basic more (i am not saying that your basic is bad; i just want to mean strengthen your basic). You can use the following link for strengthening your quant score. https://gmatclub.com/forum/ultimate-gma ... l#p1886497 What materials are you using specially for verbal?

lcbdelgado · Answer

Tks for the answer!

I've gone through Target on-line course and done some official answer for Quant.
While for Verbal I went through E-gmat complete course and used their bank of questions for practice.

The good point is that at least I have a track of where are my weak points. But at this time of my preparation I wasn't ready to go back to basics...anyhow I don't see any other possible strategy as well.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi lcbdelgado,

Before I can offer you the specific advice that you’re looking for, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

Studies:
1) How long have you studied? How many hours do you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far?
3) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?
4) Have you taken any of these CATs/mocks more than once (or have you seen any of the questions before)?

Goals:
5) What is your overall goal score?
6) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

lcbdelgado · Answer

Hoping to see your insights.

Thanks!

shameekv1989 · Answer

May be you would want to review how you are reviewing Quant questions that you get incorrect as well. What I mean is that if you are getting similar kind of questions incorrect then you may want to revisit the whole concept for that particular chapter. Otherwise, you might want to look for a pattern in the 700-level questions that you get incorrect. Many of the 700-level Quant questions are just traps. And if you know what the pattern looks like, you will be able to do them pretty quickly with high accuracy.

bigge2win · Answer

Similar to the last reply, you may be missing some tricks that questions have in the 700-level range. They’re fairly similar in the sense that they test 2-3 concepts together or usually try to test edge cases that people usually miss.

There must be some general quant concepts you’re weaker on than others. Whether it’s number properties/arithmetic, algebra, word problems, geometry or statistics. Or specifically multiple choice or data sufficiency.

I’ve found that the Veritas books are REALLY good at helping people understand what the gmat tries to test and what tricks they make. It’s a different approach than say Manhattan, which is usually good for self starters who are already strong at quant or learn things really easily.

You basically have to attack the exam extremely methodologically and assess what areas to work on. Then attack one at a time. There’s no easy way to nail 700 level questions magically. But it does go back to the fundamentals and recognizing the concepts. Veritas says that you should usually recognize what concepts each question is testing within the first 20-30 seconds of seeing the question and then the rest of the time allocated to each question is to do the work to solve the problem.

Posted from my mobile device

TheUltimateWinner · Answer

lcbdelgado 
It seems that you're practicing from unofficial question. But, my suggestion will be use unofficial product for concept learning and apply your learning to ''official product''.  Don't touch a single unofficial question for practicing!

The link that I sent you is not only for basic. It'll cover everything of quant part.
Thanks__

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

HI Icbedelgado,

Q49 is a very nice quant score, so nice work so far! Regarding how to improve your quant score to a higher level, you have to go through GMAT quant 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.

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.

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 materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the  best quant courses .

You also may find it helpful to read this article about 
 how to score a 700+ on the GMAT .

Please reach out with any further questions.

Let’s do this!!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi lcbdelgado,

Assuming that you took your 3 CATs in a realistic fashion, then you appear to have the necessary skills to hit your Score Goal right now. Thus, the real question is "what you can do to maintain (or perhaps improve) your current skills while waiting for the Test Centers to reopen?" In addition, we have to better define your overall goals to make sure that you efficiently spend your time in the coming weeks (or even months).

1) What Schools do you plan to apply to in September?
2) Assuming that the At-home Exam was the only option for the foreseeable future, what is the latest that you would wait to take the At-home GMAT? Would you rather push back your Applications - assuming that you will eventually be able to take the GMAT at a Test Facility (than take the At-home GMAT)?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

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