GMAT Strategy

Smallz wrote:I started working in the OG in the Quant section from the back forward. Now, some of the ones at the end were pretty tough and I have worked on understanding those. But, when I got around 200 and below, they seemed to get very easy. I did 20 from about 160 to 140 and I understood and answered all of them easily.

My worry is that I will be very good at this level of questions, so I will quickly get to tougher ones which I wouldn't have had as much practice with from the OG and won't be very good at answering, then I'll drop significantly.

Has anybody else had this feeling? Should I be able to get around 700 if I can answer and understand every question in the OG?

OG is definitely ordered by difficulty in each section--I think you were wise to start practicing with the tough questions first. Personally, that's how I conducted my own prep as well.

My advice would be to supplement your practice with Kaplan practice tests and practice problems. In my experience, Kaplan questions seemed consistently tougher than the questions I saw in OG. Also, check out the questions posted in this forum as well as the resources on the GMAT Resource Wiki. I think you have plenty of tough questions to practice with prior to your test.

Best of luck!

Don't forget that you do can learn a lot from the problems you already know how to do. Learn the structure of the problem, the way in which is is presented, so that you can recognize similar structures, or parts of structures, on harder problems. This helps you break down the harder problems more easily and know what to do with them more quickly.

Also, it's not enough just to be able to do a certain set of problems - you also have to think about how you can do them more efficiently, because as you lift your level, you will have to deal with a harder mix of overall questions - so you have to get faster at the ones you can already do to give you a little extra time on the harder ones.