bb wrote:
Just to pitch in without being asked, as I usually do, I would always highly recommend to focus on the easier and medium level questions and eliminating mistakes there. Here is why:
1. You have to pass a lot of medium and easy questions to get to the hard ones so while you’re preparing to fight the giants, you may never see them
2. The penalty for missing a hard question is fairly negligible compared to that missing an easy or a medium level question so the ROI is further skewed in favor of mastering medium and easy.
3. Lately, many people have reported and observed getting a large number of medium in the easy questions on the test I’m getting surprisingly low scores while missing four questions in the entire section. This led me to speculate and believe that the test they took contained fewer hard questions. This is likely because it’s more expensive and harder to create hard questions. you also have to remember that the exam bank pool of questions changes every two weeks so you can only imagine the pressure to keep creating new hard questions on the regular basis
4. While you’re practicing medium and easy questions, you are also practicing hard ones. Not exactly since as you mentioned probability of combinations doesn’t get solved by knowing geometry but solving an easy probability question does help you when dealing with the hardet one.
5. Finally, you can only hold so many things in your mind. I tend to over emphasize this but it’s true. While you can cram a hard probability concept in, you will probably do that at a cost of some thing else. Such as forgetting fractions or some basic grammar rule. As a result, it is a significantly better investment of time to focus on the medium and easy questions, even if you’re looking for a high score.
As proof, I can share my experience though it is dated, it applies. Because the older editions of the books I used did not have probability and combinations, I did not cover those topics at all. So when I showed up on my test and got a probability question, I spent about four minutes trying to solve it. That’s a lot of time I wasted. I guessed it and I guessed it wrong. I got Q49 at the end. I don’t recommend this and I suggest that you know how to solve a basic probability question and how the solution supposed to be worked out but I completely ignored this topic and it’s clearly worked out. Again, I have made a lot of mistakes that I don’t recommend you repeat because there is an element of luck but it illustrates the combination of stupidity and good luck can still produce a decent result and if you remove both stupidity and luck then in the worst case scenario you still end up with a decent result.
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Thanks for your reply. I will change the way I am preparing now.