Improvement strategy for Quant

[mandakini.kotia]

Hi

My test is three weeks from now.

I am consistently scoring a 48 in Quant in practice tests and wish to take it to 50.What strategy could I follow to achieve that?

About 80% of mistakes in Quant are careless mistakes.I know the stuffs but still I get it wrong.I cannot afford to slow down because I usually finish the Quant section just in time.

Please advise.

Thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

When you make careless mistakes, are you spending full time on that question? Or do you tend to average, say, 1m30s on the questions on which careless mistakes tend to happen?

If you are already going more quickly than expected, then you do need to slow down - and you need to take that time from other questions in the section on which you are spending too much time. Literally in the last post I just answered, the student thanked me for helping rebalance his or her timing - s/he saw a 4 point jump in the score simply by re-balancing.

Do this analysis on your most recent practice test:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/articles/e ... -part1.cfm

If you notice that you are spending too long on some (>2.5m) and not enough on others, and those "too fast" questions are where the careless mistakes come in, then you MUST learn to re-balance your time and that WILL mean giving up on some questions that you might be answering correctly right now but in 3+ minutes.

You also to figure out how to build better habits to minimize careless mistakes. If you do NOT have a timing problem, then you don't need to worry about the above timing stuff, but you still need to do this "build better habits" thing.

This quant article talks about how to learn from your errors and how to minimize careless mistakes:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/07/ ... s-on-quant

You'll never completely get rid of careless mistakes, but you can learn to minimize them. The basic idea is to figure out exactly WHY you made any mistakes that you made and then build certain good habits or break certain bad habits to minimize the chances of repeating that same error in future. Read the article for more and let me know if you have any questions!