GMAT Ninja Study Plan Week 2

• Hopefully it didn't replace something that you needed more than a quant practice test. It was listed as optional – and as always, we want you to use your time wisely.
• Don't overreact to the score. It's nearly impossible for non-official practice tests to mimic the actual scoring of the GMAT, so the score itself doesn't matter much.
• Count your careless errors. No, really: please count them. In the long run, you’ll need to completely eliminate those careless errors on quant – and nothing else matters until you do.
• Count the number of questions that took 3+ minutes. In the long run, there should be none of these; this time management video might help a bit if you haven't already seen it.
• Don’t spend a ton of time reviewing every question you missed. We’ll say more about that in the quant section below.

Benchmarks for Your Week 2 Quant Results

• Count the errors that make you go "whoa, how the 🤬 did I miss THAT one?!?" No really: count them, for EVERY quant set you completed. Then divide that by the total number of questions to get your careless error rate.

Careless error rate: < 5%. If you make careless errors on 5% of questions now, you’ll make far more under the pressure of the actual exam – maybe three times as many, which means that you’d make about 5 goofy errors on your actual test. And that will destroy your score. So please get this careless error rate down to 1-2% at most.

• OG & Quant Guide sets (#1-3 on the list): 85-90% correct is excellent, 80% is probably good. Just remember that WHAT you miss is more important on the GMAT than how many you missed: careless errors are apocalyptic. If you missed OG questions on topics that you haven't studied, that's totally cool -- you'll have time to learn those things.
• Randomized batches of forum questions (#4-8 on the list): 85-90% correct is good on the sub-600 questions, but if you did mixed difficulty sets, you’ll have to take the results with a grain of salt. If you happened to see nasty, strange questions, 50-60% might be pretty good. Don’t overreact if the percentage wasn’t great, though.
• Speed: On the OG and topic-based sets, you're in good shape if you’re reasonably close to 2 minutes per question. If you're slower than, say, 2:30 per question on average, it might be a sign that your basic skills are rusty, or that you're not choosing efficient paths forward -- and you'll be able to improve those things over time.

What Should You Do About Your Quant Weaknesses in Week 2?

• If your careless error rate is too high: address this problem ASAP. Nothing else matters on quant until you do. Check out the resource list in the study plan for help.
• If you struggled on specific topics (algebra, geometry, exponents), don’t panic. It’s far too easy to overreact to a few errors, and study these problems until your eyeballs burst. Instead, try to put your struggles in context: did you miss particularly hard or strange versions of these questions? Were your errors careless? If so, you probably don’t need to do much studying, exactly. But if you missed basic questions because your foundations are shaky, then you might need to do some remedial studying, and it might even make sense to “pause” the study plan to do so – but don’t assume that you need to do this unless the data is very, very clear about your weaknesses.
• If you struggled on the OG or Quant Guide sets: don’t panic. Again: ask yourself WHY you struggled. If you’re at, say, 70-80% accuracy, that’s not ideal right now. But context matters: if mosts of those errors are on topics you’ve never really studied, you’re in great shape, since you have plenty of time to learn those in the next 11 weeks.
• If you got CRUSHED by ALL of the quant homework: if you’re nowhere close to the benchmarks on quant – and if your long-term goal is a high-40s score – then maybe you need to back away from the study plan, and invest some time in rebuilding your basic quant skills. If that’s the case for you, tag us in the thread, give us as much detail as you can about your situation, and we’ll try to help.
• How much time should you spend reviewing individual quant questions? Not much, please! Because it can take SOOOOOOO much time to review a question, it should be your absolute last resort. That’s why we want you to redo questions first – sometimes, you’ll see your mistake right away, and that’s the best way to learn. If you miss a question a second time, then maybe it’s a sign of an underlying issue.
• No, really: resist the temptation to obsess over individual questions. Instead, look for patterns in your errors – an error on one question might be a fluke (or a weird, hard, or badly written question), but if you miss several related questions, you have an opportunity to get a good ROI on your study time by addressing a general weakness via a video or articles or books.

Benchmarks for Your Week 2 Verbal Results

• Accuracy on LSAT CR & RC sets: if your goal is a 40V or above, we eventually want to see 80% accuracy on LSAT CR and RC. That’s your long-run goal. It’s OK if you’re not quite there in Week 2.
• Efficiency on LSAT CR & RC sets: in the long run, you’ll need to complete full LSAT sets in under 60 minutes to have a shot at finishing the GMAT verbal section on time. If you’re in the 60-70 minute range right now, that’s still OK – you have time to become more efficient and energetic in your approach. If you’re slower than that, we might be worried. More on that below.
• Consistency on LSAT CR & RC sets: your errors and times should fall within a fairly narrow range across ALL of your LSAT sets. LSAT sets (~25 Qs each) do not vary much in difficulty, so if your errors or times fluctuate wildly, that’s a sign that you’re doing very different things at different times – and that’s not cool. You’ll certainly struggle more on some passages than others, but the results on the full sets of ~25 questions should be pretty stable.
• GMAT OG & Verbal Guide RC & CR questions: we can’t give you a benchmark, because it just depends on the difficulty level of the questions that you happened to do. All I can say is that you’ll want to look for HUGE patterns in your mistakes: are science passages freaking you out? Are you overwhelmingly missing a certain question type? If the patterns are CLEAR, they’re worth addressing, but don’t overreact to a question or two.

What Should You Do About Your Verbal Weaknesses in Week 2?

• Don’t panic. CR and RC progress can be slow. Take a long view: are you seeing ANY improvement in your average accuracy and times from Week 1 until now? If so, great – even if that improvement is small.
• Look for “careless” errors. As with everything on the GMAT, pay close attention to anything that seemed to be an “unforced error.” Did you miss a ton of questions that felt easy to you? If so, you might want to revisit the techniques in the videos and articles in the assignment list.
• If your results are significantly better on RC than on CR: that’s not a bad thing! There’s no reason why you can’t bring your CR results to the level of your RC, but something is funky in your approach to CR. In the coming weeks, you might want to invest time in some extra CR sets or videos – we’ll provide recommendations each week.
• If you’re better at CR than RC: again, this isn’t a bad thing! You can bring your RC up to the level of your CR. When this happens, the most common reasons are that you’re obsessing over details when you read RC (and missing the “big picture” by doing so), or you’re struggling to stay focused through a long passage. Maybe you’ll want to err on the side of getting a bit of extra practice on RC in the coming weeks, and we’ll keep feeding you videos that might help.
• If you’re slow ( > 60 mins per LSAT set): well, I wish that I could tell you exactly what’s happening, but there are a ton of different reasons why your times might be high. At this stage, maybe you’re still learning new approaches, so you’re still figuring out how to integrate them into your process – if that’s the case, your times will come down. Maybe you’re not doing each set with test-like intensity. Maybe there’s inefficiency in your process – and if that’s the case, it’s likely that you’re still struggling to fully incorporate the techniques that you’ll see in the videos. It’s also possible that you’re a slow reader, and that’s a hard thing to fix. I wish I could tell you which of these things is happening – but you’ll have to figure that part out for yourself, unfortunately.
• If you’re getting impatient with your results: hey, it’s Week 2. If you’re above 80% on your LSAT sets, you’re doing GREAT. If you’re in the 60-80% range, you still have time to improve.
• If you’re getting CRUSHED on CR & RC: my heart hurts for you, because that’s a terrible feeling. If your goal is something like a 30V or a 35V, our benchmarks are too aggressive – so 60% or below on your LSAT sets might not be too bad. But if you have ambitious goals (40V+) and you’re truly struggling to understand the passages, it’s possible that you need to spend some time working on your fundamental reading skills before returning to GMAT-specific verbal prep. This article and this one will give you some ideas for how to improve your reading precision over time.