WillNotGiveUp wrote:I guess my real question is how do I master each quant topic? I have read each book cover to cover and done drills but that's obviously not enough.
Scoring high often takes doing simply more than you have done. It becomes a bit of a project, and you can't just rely on some basic explanations and no big deal drills. You have to go beyond that to really understanding how the questions work, and how the math underlying them works.
When I do practice problems, I don't know how to approach most of them to start off with. Am I missing a step here?
For instance, you could learn some strategies for answering rate questions and do some drills, and in doing all that you would learn to get basic rate questions right most of the time, but if a somewhat more complex or twisted rate question shows up, and likely one will as you get into the 700's, then if you haven't totally understood the underlying concepts and looked at them from different angles, you won't, as you said, know how to get to the answer.
So part of what's missing is depth of understanding. Another part may be just spending more time per question pondering how to get to the answer. I mean, for one thing the way to get a high score on the test is to figure out, hack, estimate, do SOMETHING to get to right answers, and the skills used in doing those things are usually best developed via pondering how to get to answers. "What can I do here?"
The truth is that most people, even people who score deep into the 700's don't immediately see how to answer every question. It's what you do when you don't see how at first that makes the difference, and you need to get used to pushing until you do see.
One way to practice that is to make the questions you don't know how to answer into research projects. If you truly don't know how to answer one, rather than giving up on that question and going to the explanation, you could go back to your resources and do some research into what goes into how to answer such a question. Often you can keep working and researching until you get the answer, and in going through that process you develop the depth of understanding that you needed all along to get the answer.
Generally speaking you need to realize that getting to your score goal is going to be a bit of a project, and that there is a reason why only 10% of people score 700 or higher on the GMAT. To get a top score, you have to do some top work.
For some more ideas, check out what I did during my training for the last time I took the test. I may not have needed to do as many questions as I did, but overall the level of intensity described in the post is basically what it takes to score relatively high.
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2015/05/ ... rty-murray
