Practice Session Issue

[teal777]

Hello Stacey,

I have been having this constant debate with one of my friends about the way to do GMAT practice problems. My point is that we need to review all the practice problems regardless of if we got the question right or wrong. We need to review all the problems. He thinks that the problem that in only 500-600 level and that you get correct within the right amount of time, you don't need to review that at all.

My practice sessions take a lot longer than his ,and also I haven't been able to cover as many problem as him. Will not doing a large number of problems impact my score negatively?

Also, OG has a lot of questions that are easy and the actual questions on the exam are relatively harder. Should I be focusing only on the hard problems if I am at the 46 level in Quant to elevate my score on the Quant? Is doing only hard problems and ignoring easy ones a good idea?

[StaceyKoprince]

I do what you do. (And I'll remind your friend that I've scored in the 99th percentile multple times. :)

So let's say you try something and you get it right and your time was fine and everything else. You're done, right?

NO! Definitely not. Here are important things to learn:

1) How to do the same problem faster (without increasing the chances of making a mistake). This is CRUCIAL because you're hoping to raise your score. If you do raise your score, the mix of questions you get will be harder - you'll start to get a higher proportion of harder questions, right? Well, that means that when you see questions that you consider "easy" or "medium" questions right now, they have to be "super easy" in future - that is, you have to answer them accurately and even more quickly - when you're getting a harder overall mix of questions!

2) Learning HOW to make an educated guess is easiest on questions that you understand (the ones you got right). Ditto for spotting traps or finding more efficient ways to do the problem. Then, you apply that knowledge to harder questions of the same type when you don't know how to solve them.

Having said that, I will say: yes, you can skip some "lower level" questions (I put "lower level" in quotes because the definition obviously varies based upon your skill level). If you're scoring in the 70th percentile, you do still need to study 50th and 60th percentile questions (again because you need to be able to do them very efficiently without sacrificing accuracy), but you don't need to worry about studying 30th percentile questions so much.

How do you know how difficult a question is? You don't in any objective sense, but you know based upon how easy you find the questions. If you can do the question accurately in well under the expected time and with zero mistakes, okay, fine. Glance quickly to see if you can think of an alternate, even faster solution method, but otherwise, you can go ahead.

Answer something correctly and without too much difficulty but in the expected timeframe? Spend time thinking about alternate paths or solution methods that will save time. Realize that a certain trap is set (quant) or certain answers are especially tempting (verbal)? Spend some time thinking about how and why they set that trap and how to avoid it. (e.g., on verbal, understand exactly WHY someone would pick that tempting wrong answer - what faulty reason would people use? Now you know not to use that reasoning in future to pick an answer, because the reasoning led to a wrong answer on this problem! Conversely, WHY would someone eliminate the right answer? I always ask myself this because that's a big trap on verbal. Etc.)

So make sure that you aren't only focusing on the problems that you find hard. Yes, you want to do those too, but you also have things to learn from problems that you think are "medium" (you can do them but you use all or most of the time) or even easy. Remember: if you do lift your score, the "medium" questions will have to become the new "totally easy" questions for you. That's not going to happen by magic. :) You have to figure out how to make it happen!