GMAT Strategy

Hi All!

So I recently took my first GMAT exam, my Verbal score was in the 90th percentile (without ever having studied for this section) and my essay received a 6.0. I got a 4 in IR, but my Quant left MUCH to be desired. Does anyone else in here who is naturally adept at verbal areas have any tips or stories to share about how they conquered the GMAT Quant section?

Any and all help will be sincerely appreciated!

-Kylie

Kylie,

I was in a similar situation. The best way, I found, was to just practice practice and practice. Start with a basic review book so you learn/relearn all the fundamentals. Then, with the practice problems you can them and see where you need the most work and focus there. A lot of the problems have a certain way to be solved, and it's getting comfortable enough with all the different types of problem types that is most important. That way, when you take the test, you know how the writers want you to solve each problem. you may not solve it correctly, but you will know how to solve all of them.

Kylie,

My situation is somewhat similar. While I am pretty strong in quant, it's still challenging to even finish the section. On the other hand, I find verbal to so natural that I barely needed to prepare, though I can do better still by preparing for verbal too, and I tend to finish verbal with time to spare.

So here is what I did to get my quant score higher.

Number one, I am clear to myself that I can do this. This is just about improving a skill. It's eminently doable. Anyone can do this and I am confident that I can.

By the way, while verbal may seem different from quant, many of the same logic related skills and problem solving skills apply to both.

Next, I worked incrementally. I looked over practices tests and otherwise assessed where I could improve and started going after quant in sections.

For instance, I realized that I was kinda clueless about mixture problems. So I learned about mixture problems and did enough that I was comfortable with them. Ok, now, if there were any mixture problems on my CAT, I would score a little higher.

I also realized that the whole data sufficiency scene made me a little scared and queasy. So I did data sufficiency question after data sufficiency question until I was super comfortable with the type.

Permutations, same thing, from newbie to expert. Probability, sequences, one topic after the other. The more scared of a topic I am, the more I work on it, until I get comfortable with it and don't bug out when I see a question of that type.

By the way, generally you are better off getting more basic skills than working a lot on certain more sophisticated problem types like probability questions. In other words, many questions will somehow require number manipulation or geometry skills, while few to none on any give test will require super good permutation skills.

So that's pretty much my strategy, and you can even make a score target and just work topic by topic until you are confident that you will hit it.

As a final comment, one other thing I do is work on my mind in general and even meditate to see what is going on with me that quant is such a challenge. One can have a math block or be somehow against doing math or have other psychological stuff going on, and, naturally, dealing with that kind of stuff can really change how one performs on quant.