Quant and Verbal Question Bank - Advice needed

[vsathya]

Hi,

I would like to take timed Quant and Verbal tests. Where can I get such question banks? Any recommendations?

thanks,
Sathya.

[StaceyKoprince]

Are you talking about taking separate quant and verbal sections? Or entire tests?

For entire tests, the two I recommend are our own CATs and GMATPrep.

If you are talking about doing 37-question and 41-question full "sections" by themselves, I don't recommend doing that. If you're going to do a full section, you should do a whole test.

If you are just practicing (even if you're trying to practice timing or stamina), do shorter sections - around 20 questions - and then spend a TON of time reviewing before you do another section. You want to be able to iterate - to get better constantly - so you don't want to waste 40 questions each time. Do shorter sections (and other kinds of study) for a week to two weeks, then take a full practice test when you want to test yourself to see what kind of progress you've made.

For the shorter question sets, make them up yourself from the Official Guide. You want the question sets to be like "mini tests" - so the questions should be chosen randomly (not all in one topic); they should have about an even mix of the different question types (DS and PS, with a few more PS; or SC, CR, and RC, with a few more SC); and they should reflect a range of difficulty levels. In OG, the questions get harder as the numbers get higher, so don't pick 5 or 10 questions in a row; skip around a bit.

Time yourself by adding up the time for the number of questions you've chosen using these guidelines; that's your time limit for your section:

Quant - 2m
SC - 1m15s
CR - 2m
RC - 2m (shorter passage) to 3m (longer passage) to read; 1.5m per question

When you get later in your study, you can also use GMAT Focus for mini quant tests (www.gmatfocus.com) but I wouldn't use that until you've been through whatever you're using to learn quant at least once and are ready for a good review.

[vsathya]

Hi Stacey,

Thanks a lot for your response. My intend was to improve speed and felt kind of lazy to choose the questions myself from the OG :(

I took 1 test from GMATPrep and 1 test from MGMAT and scored 650 on both the tests (in actual test condition) :( In the MGMAT test, i was in the 99th percentile in the middle of the Quant section and ended up in the 74th percentile because of not managing time. So, thought of doing multiple practice tests to improve my speed.

My worry is, OG questions are too easy to me. I'm able to breeze through them. So, I'm not sure if that would really help me for my Quant. In this case, would you recommend GMATFocus tests for me? Please let me know.

Also, I purchased the Adv. Quant book from MGMAT. It's awesome!! It just made me raise my eyebrows with amazing questions! I practiced all the 150 questions at the end of this book and averaged 60-70%. I feel really bad about not able to crack all the questions. Am I under-prepared?

Thanks,
Sathya.

[StaceyKoprince]

Ah, okay - you're having timing problems. Read the below article and start doing what it says:

http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... anagement/

Don't try to fix timing problems by just taking lots of full tests (or even full sections). That's a REALLY inefficient way to get better. Start doing the things described in the article - you're going to start question-by-question and with smaller sets of 5 to 10 questions and then work your way up. :) Do some of that work first, maybe by using questions from our online Question Banks (if you have our books, then you also have access to the Question Banks), then test yourself out using GMAT Focus.

But try to get better first - think of GMAT Focus as a test to determine whether you've gotten better, not the mechanism by which you are going to learn to get better.

I'm glad you like the Advanced Quant book! Keep going back through it - I would be surprised if you could get all of the questions on your first time through. Keep practicing the techniques described and training yourself to study and learn to analyze your way through things, and you'll start cracking more of those questions!