How to use the OG

[MichaelF60]

Hi,

Until last week I was using the Strategy Guides 5th Ed. and after completing every Chapter I was doing all the Official Guide exercises listed on the Problem Solving Set and on the Data Sufficiency Set for that topic. My plan was to finish reading all the books and then solve the exercises from the Quantitative Review and the Verbal Review on a random order.

This week I bought the 6th Ed. of the Strategy Guides and although the books give some guidance on how to use the OG, It's still not clear to me. My understanding from reading the books instructions is that I should not do the OG exercises after completing each Strategy Guide chapter. Instead I should do only the mid-quiz and final-quiz and solve all the other OG, Quantitative Review and Verbal Review problems after completing all the Strategy Guides? Is that correct?

So far I have completed two books.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Michael

[StaceyKoprince]

Good question. It's not a great idea to do ALL of the questions from OG chapter by chapter because half of the battle on the GMAT is figuring out what each new question is. When you are doing all of the fractions problems, for example, you already know the main topic that the problem tests, and you have all of the minor topics top of mind because you just read about / studied them.

On the real test, each new question could be testing anything and there's no way that you'll have every last thing that you studied immediately top of mind. You'll have to figure out what that question is testing and then try to figure out what to do with it.

It's okay to try a few problems at the end of each chapter, but save the rest for more mixed problem sets. As you finish subsequent books, work in some problems from the previous books, both to review and to give yourself more of that "This problem could be anything! What is it?" practice.

Next, something like 80% of your learning comes after you finish doing a practice problem. Your analysis of that problem is where you learn the most. Read this:
http://tinyurl.com/2ndlevelofgmat

If you haven't already been studying in that way, go back and do so for the books / problems that you already finished. You have a lot more to get out of those problems before you keep going. :)