nat724 wrote:
Hi All,
I'm new to the forum, but appreciate all the posts that I've read, since I've been lurking for a while now. I'm taking the GMAT sometime near end of June to mid-July. I took one of the free practice GMAT tests, cold, on GMATprep and scored a 42 on quant. I looked back through my mistakes and I made 3 stupid mistakes because I was rushing. Most of the problems I missed (and weren't sure how to approach) were similar to ones like "If n is a positive integer and the product of all integers from 1 to n..." and the data sufficiency. I feel like I wasted time on the first problem type, because I was trying to think of a way to do it more purely mathematical and am now realizing it's more of just understanding what it's asking and using numerical sense and testing numbers (other ideas?).
I started working through the
OG 2016 quant questions yesterday and did 60 problem solving and 30 data sufficiency. So far, based on what I've done, I'm at 90% accuracy for both of them, with some of them just being silly mistakes.
The GMAT is, bizarrely, totally unlike a high school math test in this regard. It doesn't take into account the % you get right or wrong at all when calculating your score - instead, it changes the difficulty of the test so that most people get about the same % right, and your score at the end is basically a measure of how tough a test you took.
If you're consistently getting 90% of Q questions right
within 2 minutes each, that means you're studying questions that are a bit too easy. Ideally, since the test will try to show you problems it thinks are 'at your level', that's where you want to study (well, those problems, and ones that are just a
little harder.) You're right that the
OG gets harder as you go through a section, so I'd recommend skipping to the middle and trying to find a point where you're missing 1/3 to 1/2 of the questions. Keep in mind that I'm counting anything you can solve, but can't solve
within 2.5 minutes or so as a miss! Timing is critical.
For Data Sufficiency, it might be a good idea to do the MPrep free trial class, even if you aren't planning to register for a full course. DS strategy is covered extensively in that session, and there are a lot of online sections to choose from. Here's a link to the list of upcoming classes; you can attend session 1 of any of them for free:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/classes/In your position, at least for now, I'd think of Quant as mostly a way to take a break from Verbal. You need to pay quite a bit more attention to Verbal, given your current score breakdown, than you do to Quant. Don't totally ignore Quant - a few more points never hurt anybody - but you'll see much larger gains from learning the Verbal material.
close
25 May 2016, 12:11
