Need Advice

[MGMAT Fan]

Hi Stacey,

First of all, thank you for the great job you do. So many of us have benefitted from your advice on these forums.

Recently, I saw your suggestions on GMATfocus on one of the forum questions and have purchased a quant diagnostic.

I scored in the 46-50 range. I did make some careless mistakes though. However, from the analysis I realized, I am actually

spending on average 85 sec on correct answers and 170 sec on wrong answers! Do you have any suggestions?

My weak areas are data sufficiency in question type, alegbra in content and pure/formula based in application questions.

Actually, I have been known to be good in quant. I scored 800s in my sat & gre tests. However, gmat seems to be tougher to

accomplish that feat. Have already done lots and lots of practice but I am not finding any significant improvement..

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks!
MGMAT Fan

[StaceyKoprince]

It's INCREDIBLY difficult to score an 800 because this test just gets harder as you get better! What did you think of the GMAT Focus diagnostic, by the way? I haven't had a chance to check it out yet.

First, re: the timing thing, just notice that you actually DON'T get better when you spend more time on questions. (None of us do!) Spending 2+ minutes per question just indicates that (a) we don't really know how to do the question and (b) we're just stubbornly hanging onto the question even though we don't really know what to do.

You WILL get questions you cannot do, no matter how good you get, so the first thing you need to do is just acknowledge that, at times, you'll get things you can't do. Your only strategically good choice there is to make an educated guess and move on without going over your 2 minutes.

So, go study the ones on which you're spending too much time. Figure out why - do you not really know the content being tested? Do you not know what the problem is really asking? Are you doing too much computation when there is some kind of shortcut? (There's always a shortcut.) Are you making careless mistakes when you do have to do too much computation? Etc.

For some of those, you will convert them into "problems I can do in 2 minutes" by getting better at whatever's holding you down there - depending on your answer to the question: WHY did I spend too much time and / or get this wrong?

For some, you will tell yourself - yeah, I should just let this one go. Instead, think about how you'd make an educated guess on that problem within 2 minutes, then pick something and move on.

Also, practice how to make educated guesses on problems that you DO know how to do the "official math" way. It's much easier to learn the process of educated guessing on things you do understand and then just apply those lessons when you hit something you can't do.

Also, remember that simple practice only gets you so far. The thing that will maximize your score is analysis, not practice. As one of my fellow teachers (Eric) likes to say - if you were learning to play the piano, do you think the best way would be to practice 500 different pieces once each without making connections between them? Or should you take, say, 50 pieces and analyze them to learn how to get better at all of piano in general? (Hmm. My finger positioning isn't right and it's slowing me down. Let's take the time to get better at finger positioning right now and that will help me on future pieces, too.)

[MGMAT Fan]

Thanks Stacey!

Regarding your question, the product is good and more than anything its official. Its very close to GMATPrep and it offers some score analysis after the test. But its very costly. For $30, one gets just 24 questions.

[StaceyKoprince]

Yeah, I saw that. You can also buy 3 tests at once for $75, so $25 per, and you are guaranteed unique questions for all three tests... but still pretty expensive.