how many practice questions (OG11) per day should I do?

[phil]

So I've completed the MGMAT class, and thoroughly gone through all of the Manhattan material.

At this point, what would be a good number of practice questions to do daily?

I study about 5 times a week, and would like to take the test towards the end of this month or early next month.

thanks!

[Guest]

the people that score 700 do at least 1 million math questions per day. make that ur target :cry:

[phil]

referring back to http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/fin ... t2971.html, I understand that it's quality, not quantitiy, that counts, but how many questions per day should I be doing this for?

[Guest]

honestly, i totally disagree with what the instructors say. if you're a genius and you can apply what you've learned from one single problem to another, then yeah, focus on quality. but if you aren't so smart, then that's a huge problem. there's just so many twisted ways that gmat can turn around a problem. practice makes perfect. I've met a couple of people scoring pretty high in quant and they've done all the gmat problems on the forums or they are from engineering backgrounds with a strong quantitative focus. if you need a good score in math, you have to do A LOOOT of problems. this somewhat prepares you to face the unexpected.

good luck!

[StaceyKoprince]

Yes, I strongly believe quality is more important than quantity. This doesn't mean you can study just one question, of course, or that quantity is completely unimportant - you have to balance the two.

Many students I see who aren't studying the right way will do, say, 15 questions in 30 minutes (2 minutes per) and then take maybe 15 minutes total to go review those questions. Ignore the ones I got right. Ignore the ones I got wrong but I find a careless mistake really quickly, so I knew what I was doing but just made a dumb mistake. Read the explanations of the other ones I got wrong. Understand most of the explanations and don't do any further work. Maybe concentrate on one or two super-hard ones trying to figure out what's going on.

That's a bad way to study. You don't put yourself in a position to recognize things - instead, you're having to start from scratch on almost every new problem that you see.

First, you review EVERY question, even the ones you got right. Did you get the question right for the right reasons? (Sometimes we get lucky.) Did you happen to do it the best way it could be done, the very first time? (Most of the time, the answer is no.) For problems of this type, how do you recognize and avoid traps? How do you make educated guesses? (It's MUCH easier to learn how to do those things on problems you understand and get right. Learn the process on the ones you get right, apply the process to harder ones of the same type when you don't know how to do the problem the "official" way.)

That right there is at least 4 minutes - and that's on problems you got right! What about when you make a careless mistake (argh - I added instead of subtracting!) but otherwise understood everything? Well, figure out WHY you made the mistake. (I didn't write down the work, so I mixed it up in my head.) Figure out what habit you're going to implement to minimize the chances of repeating such a mistake (I'm going to write EVERYthing down next time, even if I know that 9 times out of 10 I won't make the mistake - because, one time, I will).

And so on. There's a TON you can learn from each problem that you do. Learn the decision-making process you need to go through for problems of different types and learn how to recognize when you've got a problem of a particular type in front of you. Everyone does this to some extent - everyone can distinguish data sufficiency from problem solving. The 700+ people are distinguishing weighted average mixture problems from weighted average problems employing one overall average and two subgroups that add up to the overall average. Different process for each. I don't magically figure that out from scratch when I take the test - I know what the setup of each type looks like and I recognize it.

Now, yes, I score in the 99th percentile, and most people don't. If you want a 700, you don't have to recognize stuff as often as I do - but you still have to do it sometimes. I usually tell my students they're in good shape if they can recognize something in the neighborhood of about 30-50% of the problems that they do. (Something - not the entire problem, necessarily, though that happens sometimes - but SOME part of what's in front of them.)

So back to the original question. If you do a set of 15 problems, you'll need about 30 minutes just to do them. You'll then want about 60 to 90 minutes to review those problems before doing more. There's one evening's worth of study right there. If you're in our course, review the "how to study" strategy lesson from class 2. Answer those questions for every problem you do!

Be thoughtful. Analyze - don't just do. Good luck! :)