Hi!
This is an old post but a great question, so I thought I’d share some guidance and resources.
There’s a lot going on in those practice test score reports! ManhattanPrep offers a great Practice Test Tracker & Analysis Tool that’s available through our
Free GMAT Starter Kit.
Our Practice Test Analysis Tool emphasizes some key priorities when reviewing your practice tests:
- Analyze your timing. Keep in mind that with standard time, the benchmark for Quant problems is two minutes. Use the detailed, question-by-question report to categorize your problems based on whether you were well over time, right on time, or well under time. Look at the cost and benefit of those decisions. Is going under time causing you to make careless mistakes? Is going over time resulting in a rush at the end of the test? Our guided analysis will help you identify problematic patterns in your timing and determine the best remedies.
- Categorize your errors (and successes). Unfortunately, even the analytics produced by your score report can’t tell you why you missed certain problems — and that’s the key data that will help you improve. Review each problem on your test, categorizing misses based on whether you made a content, strategy, or execution error. If a problem still doesn’t make sense upon review, note it as something you may want to intentionally skip next time. For questions you got right, note whether they were lucky guesses or demonstrations of your content knowledge. This will help you refine your study plan to prioritize what you’re actually struggling with, beyond the broad topics generated by the score report.
- Look for major performance differences. Are you performing over 15 percentile points worse in one content area than another? How about real versus pure context math? Cross-reference those distinctions with your question-by-question review to see if there might be an area where you need to rebuild foundations.
This type of review takes time, but it’s 100% worth it! I recommend taking twice as long to review problems as you spent doing them, because that’s where the learning’s at.
Happy studying!
Ally Bell
ManhattanPrep GMAT Instructor