Quant Score- 50. Suggestions/ Books for improvement

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Hi,

Gave the first practice exam on GMAT Prep Software and got a quant score of 50 (with 7 Qs incorrect). I am from a non-maths background so started my Quant prep with the Manhatten Strategy Guides. I have also gone over questions in the OG and the OG-Quantitative Review. Could you please give me suggestions as regards books l which I should go over for improving my quant score? I now want to focus on tougher questions. Would really appreciate any input on this since the OG seems to have very few tough questions.

Thanks!

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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Mon Nov 16, 2015 8:25 am
The Question Pack has some quality material: https://www.mba.com/us/store/store-catal ... ack-1.aspx

And see our free question bank: https://www.veritasprep.com/gmat-question-bank/

Last, make sure you're budgeting your time wisely. If you're already scoring 50 on quant, there isn't much room for improvement, so make sure that you're not neglecting the verbal side.
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by MartyMurray » Mon Nov 16, 2015 8:51 am
Another great quant question bank is the BellCurves question bank, at https://bellcurves.com. You can access it by going to the GMAT area and setting up a practice account. The explanations are not always great, but you can be sure that there you will find, with a few freaky questions mixed in, thousands of tricky quant questions that can provide just the type of practice you need to score V51.

Another thing that works well is using search engines to find questions in each category. There are even good questions included in many blog posts.

To get the most from your practice, you are probably best off doing questions topic by topic so that by doing similar questions one after the other you really gain awareness of how to get certain types of questions right.
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by [email protected] » Mon Nov 16, 2015 12:12 pm
Hi sjo565,

What is your OVERALL Score goal? I ask because raising a Q50 to a Q51 won't mean much to your Overall Score if your Verbal score isn't particularly strong. By extension, all of that extra time that you're talking about spending on Quant practice would probably be better spent on Verbal practice.

1) How long have you been studying?
2) What resources have you used?
3) When are you planning to take the GMAT?

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by sjo565 » Mon Nov 16, 2015 12:50 pm
David, Marty & Rich- Thank you for all the inputs. Will check out the resources all of you recommended.

Rich- My target score is 750 plus.

Appreciate the point you as well as David raised about focussing on Verbal. I am from a law background and my verbal is generally strong. I need to do a little work on sentence correction for sure and I am hoping to do that over the next 2-3 weeks. While I did not attempt the verbal questions in the GMAT Prep Software exam (since I was more worried about where I stand in quant), in an attempt on the OG Diagnostic exam about 2 weeks back, I had 6 incorrect answers in verbal. At the end of the day, I just feel way more confident answering verbal questions than answering quant (and still have some moments of freezing up when confronted with inequalities or probability!) which is why I just want to spend a bit more time with tougher quant questions to make myself more comfortable and not panick during the exam.

Also, to answer your specific questions:
1) I started preparing about 5 weeks back. While my maths was strong in school, I have been out of touch with it for really long so I started with the basics. I am generally comfortable in verbal and have been focussing essentially on doing a few questions from the OG every week.
2) For Quant- I have used the 5 Manhatten Strategy Guides, the OG and the OG Quantitative Review. For Sentence Correction- I have started with the Manhatten Strategy Guide on SC but still need to cover most of it.
3) While I haven't finalised a date yet, I am hoping to take the exam end December or early Jan.

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by MartyMurray » Mon Nov 16, 2015 2:59 pm
To save yourself a lot of time and pain on verbal, you might as well get one thing straight from the beginning.

No strategy, no rules and nothing else is a substitute for seeing the details and logic of the questions and answer choices.

I have seen people who know so much about SC rules and GMAT verbal strategies score under 30 on verbal. Others who don't know that much about that stuff score well above 40.

The difference? The first group is seeking to over rely on rules and strategies as if GMAT verbal were a grammar test. The second group is focused on seeing details and logic and using all of that to determine which answer is best.

Clearly some knowledge of grammar rules, certain CR strategies and ways to handle reading passages can at times be useful, but just don't make the mistake of thinking that those things are what GMAT verbal is fundamentally about. Especially at the higher levels, the questions are reasoning challenges, and the harder they get the less the rules and strategies even help.

By the way, if you are so confident that you can jam on verbal, then why bother squeezing the last point out of quant? I don't want to discourage you from shooting for Q51 if you feel like doing that, but Q50 paired with any verbal score 45 and above gets you a total score above 750.

Have you seen this chart? It's pretty accurate and it can be useful.

https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/how-to-cal ... at-scores/
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by [email protected] » Tue Nov 17, 2015 9:44 am
Hi sjo565,

While it might be tempting to 'break down' CATs into pieces, there really is NO substitute for taking FULL-LENGTH CATs (including the Essay and IR sections), under realistic conditions that match what you'll face on Test Day. Given your implied Test Date and Score goal, you're going to have to be a bit more strict with your studies. Until you have a FULL CAT score, we don't know what your actual strengths and weaknesses are yet. I suggest that you plan to take one soon (perhaps this weekend), then report back here with those results. We can then talk through how you might adjust your study plan.

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by sjo565 » Mon Nov 23, 2015 5:38 am
Hi,

Thanks for those inputs.

Rich- As suggested, I took the second practice test in GMAT prep under exam-like conditions including the essay and IR. My score was 760 (IR-8 (with 4 incorrect), Quant- 50 (with 7 incorrect), Verbal- 44 (with 7 incorrect)). So now I'm hoping to give the finishing touches to my prep over a month's time.

Quant- My mistakes were pretty well spread out (with one each in inequalities, sequences, exponents, odd-even, statistics, coordinate geometry etc.) Overall, I realised I felt the most unsure of myself while doing an inequalities or an odd-even question and hence want to practice some questions in those areas. I want to focus on tough Quant questions for a couple of weeks. I have been using Manhatten Advanced GMAT. After that, I can maybe take another practice test and then a revision of all concepts and questions which I got wrong.

Verbal- 4 out of my 7 mistakes were in sentence correction, which is an area I do need to give time to. I am really not too excited about the idea of reading grammar rules and hence haven't really given time to it so far and am doing sentence correction mostly based on 'what sounds right', which clearly does not work on every question.

Marty- Thanks for that link. It was very helpful. The reason I just want to go this extra mile is that I am taking a break from work and so have the time at the moment and plus there is of course, every chance that a 750 on a practice test may only translate to a 720 on actual test day and I just want to minimise the risk as far as possible.

Please let me know any thoughts / suggestions on this.

Could you also give me thoughts on which other practice exams (apart from the GMAT Prep Software exams) are the most accurate in terms of the correlation of their scores with GMAT scores (or maybe a bit tougher than the GMAT)?

Really appreciate all the advice.

Thanks!

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by MartyMurray » Mon Nov 23, 2015 7:37 am
For quant, focused, topic by topic practice tends to work best. For instance, you could do inequalities questions until you feel as if you will never again miss one, then do the same with sequences.
4 out of my 7 mistakes were in sentence correction, which is an area I do need to give time to. I am really not too excited about the idea of reading grammar rules and hence haven't really given time to it so far and am doing sentence correction mostly based on 'what sounds right', which clearly does not work on every question.
One thing that you can do to make reading about grammar rules more palatable is to look for patterns to the sentence correction questions that you did not get right. Not getting them right is annoying, right? So if you can find patterns to why you didn't get them right, you will be motivated to at least learn about the grammar rules that underlie those patterns.

In my personal quest for V51 I found that there were really only a couple dozen key things one has to know to get pretty much every sentence correction question right. I guess that something could have shown up that would have tripped me up, but nothing did, and part of the reason for that is that sentence correction is not a grammar test, at least not for the most part. Sentence correction is mostly a reasoning test that happens to employ not all that many grammar rules in the construction the questions.

Make sure you get parallelism. Make sure you get how changing the placement of modifiers can really affect what a sentence conveys. Learn the difference between restrictive and non restrictive modifiers. There are maybe ten things like that that you need to understand clearly and another ten or fifteen things that can help a lot too. After that the returns to learning new rules and concepts diminish.

Meanwhile, go back over the sentence correction questions you don't get and see whether you can figure out a way to have gotten each right without learning anything or anything much new. Most sentence correction questions are rather hackable, and by hacking I don't mean just going with what sounds right but also really analyzing the effectiveness of the wording and noticing what meanings are being conveyed. You might get some ideas on how to hack by going to my profile and looking through my sentence correction responses. I often outline how someone could hack a question without necessarily knowing many rules or idioms, and the rules and idioms I do use tend to be the ones that appear the most in SC questions.
Could you also give me thoughts on which other practice exams (apart from the GMAT Prep Software exams) are the most accurate in terms of the correlation of their scores with GMAT scores (or maybe a bit tougher than the GMAT)?
Try the tests made by Veritas and by Manhattan Prep. While their tests and questions are not always totally like the official ones, they are good for practice and the tests tend to for most people generate fairly accurate scores. If you find that some of the questions on those tests are not exactly like official questions, remember that reasoning and noticing details the most important skills for rocking the GMAT, and the questions created by Veritas and Manhattan do challenge you to reason and notice details.
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by [email protected] » Mon Nov 23, 2015 9:55 am
Hi sjo565,

Assuming that you took this CAT in a realistic and test-like fashion, then it certainly appears that you're in the perfect position to hit your score goals. It's important to remember that the GMAT will give you the score that you EARN, so you have to continue to put in the proper effort and earn those points. At this scoring level, the GMAT becomes really 'sensitive' to little mistakes - if you make too many (especially on 'gettable' questions), then your score will likely drop.

Since you've properly assessed some of the areas that you need to work on, and your current skills are so strong, you should continue to study as you see fit. Other than the GMAC CATs, you'll probably find the MGMAT CATs to your liking.

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