from 610 to 600 to 610

[uncivil001]

Hi,
My background: I'm 33, native Israeli, have a B.Sc in mechanical engineering from a well known Israeli university. I finished in the 85 percentile.

I began my GMAT studying almost 2 years ago and did 4(!) GMATs exams.
I’ve just finished my 4th GMAT exam and got 610 (Q38 V36).

GMAT Prep scores before this exam (no repeats):
680 (Q48 V36)
690 (Q40 V40)

My previous real GMAT scores were:
500 (don't remember)
610 (Q47 V28)
600 (Q36 V36)

As you can see, I scored a 47 in the quant section in the real test. I guess that means that I can reach that score. Furthermore, I know my quant better today than last year when I scored that 47.

Besides the fact that I’m overwhelmed from the score in today’s exam and feel sorry for myself (I intend to so for a while...) I really don’t understand why I keep getting low scores in the Quantitative section.

In today’s exam I finished the first 10 questions in 30 minutes (!) and felt exhausted. Then I guessed 3 questions in between 11-20, and another 3 questions in between 21-30. I didn’t have enough time even to finish the last one so I guessed it too.

Apparently I had too many incorrect answers. I have no problem to give up now but I KNOW I can do better!

I do know that I need 2.5 minutes to do a PS question correctly and 3 minutes to do a DS question correctly. That means that I need to guess around 10 Questions.

I think I have problems with time management but can’t seem to fix this. Instead of studying again for another one, taking days off from work, I have to understand why I perform so badly in the quantitative section. How can I do that?

Thanks in advance
Guy

[JonathanSchneider]

Hi Guy,
First of all, you don't have time to spend 2.5 or 3 minutes per question on the math. Guessing randomly on a bunch of questions in order to give yourself that time is not the right approach. If you really want to score in the high 600's, you have to commit yourself to improving your timing. Good timing comes more from recognition than from guessing. In other words, it comes from what we do at the beginning of a problem, when we first see it, not from the end. I'd recommend that you work on building your recognition skills. By this I mean: how long does it take you to determine the right approach for any given problem? How can you recognize the right approach faster? What type of comparative study would you need in order to build those skills?
Second, there's clearly something going on for you on test day that is not working. Is it nerves, or are you changing your approach? Are you drinking too much caffeine and crashing mid-Verbal? You've got to figure out how to keep your head in the game. Do you ever write the essays on your practice test? If not, you were not properly simulating the exhaustion of the real thing. Take a hard look at some of those questions, and I believe you can start to piece together the road from here.

[guy_kfir2]

Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

how long does it take you to determine the right approach for any given problem? How can you recognize the right approach faster? What type of comparative study would you need in order to build those skills?

I don't think I have a problem in recognizing the right approach. I do believe that I solve slowly. I have OG 11 and Quantitative review. I tried MGMAT exams but found the math section harder than the real Gmat math section.

I'm open for suggestions.

Second, there's clearly something going on for you on test day that is not working. Is it nerves, or are you changing your approach? Are you drinking too much caffeine and crashing mid-Verbal? You've got to figure out how to keep your head in the game. Do you ever write the essays on your practice test? If not, you were not properly simulating the exhaustion of the real thing. Take a hard look at some of those questions, and I believe you can start to piece together the road from here.

I think you have a good point here. I don't write the essays in practice tests. In real test essays I manage to get 4, which is OK with me. I will practice that too.

Do you offer some sort of diagnostics I can take in order to evaluate my performance?

[StaceyKoprince]

Jonathan's right about the timing. Perhaps this knowledge will help you to develop the right mindset as far as timing is concerned: you are going to get a lot of questions wrong. Everybody does - even those of us who score in the 99th percentile.

You can get the harder questions wrong but the easier ones right and get a better score...
or...
You can get the easier questions wrong (due to lack of time) but some of the harder ones right (not all, because they're harder!) and get a worse score...

What you canNOT do is get everything (or almost everything) right. You don't have a choice about that.

In general, if you want to maximize your score, you have to be able to identify the 5-7 questions per section that are just too hard for you, and you have to make a guess before the time limit is up and move on. Ideally, the guess is an educated guess, which is just a fancy way of saying: you eliminate some wrong answers before you guess. (Even when we can't find the right answer, we can often find some answers that definitely aren't right.)

Let's say that you want to score a 700 and you actually have the skills to do so. The test is going to give you multiple questions that are harder than the 700 level. You can get every single one of those questions wrong and still get your 700.

If, on the other hand, you spend 3+ minutes trying to get those 710+ questions right, and you then get some 600 level questions wrong as a result... you're not going to get that 700 anymore.

Basically, in order to get the score you want, get the questions at or below your level right. Forget about the others. Now, it's not quite that easy in practice, because they don't tell us which ones are the harder ones. So the definition of a harder one becomes: one I can't get in the given timeframe.

Now, when you say you need 2.5 or 3 minutes, do you really mean that for every single quant question? Or is it only harder ones or only ones in certain categories (or both)? If the latter, what are those categories? (If you don't know the answer, look 2 paragraphs down.)

A big part of your task is just going to be to learn more efficient ways to do problems. There are always at least 2 ways to do any math problem. Do you know all of the ways, or are you mostly defaulting to the "official math" (read: long and convoluted) ways? I'm guessing the latter, from what you describe. And that's why it's important to return to using some of our materials - because the OG explanations won't always give you the most efficient way to do a problem, but our explanations will. It's actually good that you feel our quant is harder than the real thing - if you overprepare, then the test will feel easier for you!

Also, you asked for a diagnostic to take in order to evaluate your performance. Take another CAT. Run the assessment reports and pick through the problem lists (which give you the per-question timing data) to determine your strengths and weaknesses. This is how you can determine where you tend to spend way too much time vs. where you're actually okay. That, in turn, helps you to know what to study from the point of view of: how can I do this more efficiently? How can I shave 10, 20, 30 seconds off of this problem?

Also, one last thing: Jonathan mentioned developing recognition skills and you said you thought you were fine in that area. Let's put some numbers on it. When you look at a new problem, how long does it take you to recognize what to do? (NOT to figure it out from scratch. But to think - oh, yeah, there was that other problem that was similar to this one and I did XYZ then and I can do that here, too.)

That should typically take about 15-20 seconds, 30 absolute tops on a hard question. If you go beyond that, you're not recognizing - you're figuring it out. Is that about the timeframe for you or are you taking longer?