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i received a message regarding this thread.

a couple of comments:

* there's not a lot of detail here regarding how you actually prepared for the test. there are a ton of statistics and numbers, but not much about the actual procedure.
unfortunately, this may be a reflection of the way you've been thinking about the actual exam -- too many metrics, not enough understanding. maybe yes and maybe no, but definitely a possibility.

one of the most distinctive features of this exam is the ubiquity of "trap" answers. if a problem seems as though it's really easy, especially on the math section, it's very possible that you are falling into one of these traps.

in particular, if you have to choose between the following 2 interpretations --
1/ you solved the problem correctly, but the given answers were all wrong,
2/ you actually didn't solve the problem correctly, despite what you think,
-- then #2 is a pretty safe bet.

depends on what you mean by "concepts".

indeed, you probably don't have trouble with the objective math concepts tested on the exam -- mostly, those are just the basics of high-school algebra and geometry.
however, it's possible that you do have trouble with the following, to which you could also refer as "concepts":
* the format of data sufficiency (many students are so intent on solving "difficult" problems that they never master the basics of the format itself)
* the signature of "trap" answers
* the principal alternate / backup methods of solution (such as backsolving, plugging in your own values, etc.)
how do you feel about those?

impossible. all SC sentences are exactly one sentence.
some of the sentences may have a bunch of clauses, modifiers, etc., but there will never be more than one sentence. (hence "sentence correction", not e.g. "paragraph correction")


if you normally sleep a lot, this could make a big difference.
if you are normally sleep-deprived, then you will probably do better on the exam if you are a bit sleep-deprived.

i've highlighted in red the comment that's potentially most revealing/important here.
what does "too different" mean?

this is a really important qusetion for you to answer, because ALL gmat problems are different from ALL other gmat problems -- you're essentially never going to see superficial similarities, even though the underlying concepts are essentially the same throughout.

the "too different" comment suggests that you may have just memorized a bunch of problems in practice -- intentionally or not -- and just looked for problems that were essentially carbon copies of the ones you memorized.
if that's your approach, then you need a new approach. check out the tips in the link above.


if you have low scores on the verbal section, then this is probably not true.
the verbal section is almost purely a test of concepts. (CR and RC are pure tests of concepts; those two sections actually don't require any outside/memorized knowledge at all, apart from a certain level of mastery when it comes to reading high-level written english.) therefore, if you scored a lot lower on verbal than you wanted to, the problem is probably based in some set of conceptual shortcomings.

see above -- this is actually the entire reason why the gmat exists.
if you are expecting the problems on your actual gmat to look like the problems on which you practiced ... well, that's not going to happen.


this sounds like a good starting point, but, especially in SC, you need to break away from the "chapter-by-chapter" approach.

keep in mind -- the main challenge in SC is identifying what is actually being tested in the first place. i.e., if the problem tests parallelism, the main difficulty isn't in evaluating the parallelism; it's in identifying that the problem actually tests parallelism in the first place. etc. etc.
if you are going chapter by chapter, then you aren't getting practice in that sort of recognition. for instance, if you are just doing a list of problems labeled in the SC guide as "parallelism", then that's basically cheating, in the sense that you've removed the element of recognition from the problem.

what do you mean by this? i guess i don't really understand what you are asking here.

well, again, you need to define more precisely what you mean by "different"... whether that means (1) the problems didn't look like copies of each other, or (2) the problems seemed to test topics/ideas that weren't tested in the practice problems.

if you mean (1), then of course that's true -- that's actually the single defining characteristic of the exam, as stated above. they want to make sure that you can't beat this test just by memorizing a bunch of stuff; if you could, then the test would be useless as a measure of your reasoning abilities.

if you mean (2), then you need to work on recognition, because the underlying concepts will not, in fact, be different.
about 15-20% of the problems in OG13 are new, but, when you go through them, you'll quickly notice that they don't test any underlying ideas that are not also tested in the previous editions.

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