Seeking some expert guidance

Hey, definitely didn't mean to "accuse" (for lack of a better term) you of not analyzing your performance. I was just playing correlation...you see a lot of posts with similar content from people who are just grinding out problems and tests without a whole lot of analysis. Glad to hear you're doing all the rest, too!

A couple suggestions for you:

1) There's a drill I loving having students do for Word Problems that attempts to do two things: one is improve pacing and two is exacerbate the kinds of mistakes you make when you're under pressure from trying to push the pace. Take a set of 10 questions and give yourself 30 (or up to 40 if 30 feels too tight) seconds each. In that time, get started...put something on paper, whether it's assigning variables or setting up equations or beginning a calculation. Then after 30 seconds move on to the next one and keep going until you're through those ten. Then go back and finish the problems. The goal is to force yourself to more quickly identify common problem structures and get started, and then if you do make "silly" setup mistakes while you're doing it you're quickly aware of the kind of places you need to slow down and be careful.

2) In a similar "drill", go through 10 questions and don't even look at the question stems...just look at the answer choices and jot down a few notes if you notice anything about them. Try this first with problems you've already done since you may not have exhausted the answer choices - my theory in a case like yours (much better at DS than PS) is that at least a couple times per test you're missing some important clues in the answer choices that would help you save time or leverage those assets (for example, does it look like a number property would help; could you get away with an estimate; are there the kinds of clues like root3 or root 2 that suggest you have to find a certain kind of triangle or shape, etc.). Try this out and see if it helps...it often depends on the student or the problem set but I've had this work to show people that there's often more to the problem than the problem itself, so it at least gets them thinking of all their resources.

3) For Reading Comp, try a few passages with the mindset that you *only* care about Scope and Organization. If you jot down 5-7 words in a paragraph make no more than 3 of them related to content and the others should be structural/organizational. You're probably getting too deep in the content of each passage - that's a huge tendency of a lot of test-takers - and missing a lot of the general roadmap stuff that would help you come back to details only when you really need them. I was going through some RC passages with a student the other day and he and I were both amazed at how little I knew about the content after I finished each passage and how much he knew about it, but then on the flip side how I'd get every question right in 30-40 seconds and he was struggling. And it comes down essentially to the way we read. I read to figure out where things are for when I need to go back to find the "smoking gun" for a question, and he reads to try to understand everything. My take - they're only going to ask you 3-4 things about the passage so becoming an expert on 7-8 things is kind of a waste (plus in limited time it's hard to do). I read to set myself up for success on the questions.


See if any of that helps, and if you are looking for more problems I'd recommend using the Veritas Prep Question Bank (hundreds of free questions and a ton of great word problems especially), plus all the official stuff from mba.com.