ens137 wrote:I just took the GMAT for my second try. Want a 700!!!!
In June I score a 660-35v/45q...yesterday I got a 660-40v/39q
On my gmat practice exams my q scores in time(april to aug) order were
42,43,44,45,45
So basically I feel that the first 6 or 7 questions went great then I tried to solve a few problems that were well beyond my level. I ended up wasting ALOT of time on 2 or 3 questions then I had to scramble and got thrown off my game.
I need advice on how to get my Q up by being more proficient with my time. IDEAS??????
Thanks
stacey's advice, in the post above, is solid: you
must internalize the stopwatch and develop a gut feeling of the length of one minute (and two minutes).
on top of that advice, what follows is a bit more practical. you have to have a completely different
mentality toward solving problems than you probably do at the moment.
specifically, if you're like most gmat test takers (and most MBA students, who are, of course, essentially the same population), you're probably a hard-driving, type-A but also a careful thinker. those two character traits will combine to produce the following attitude toward problem solving:
TYPICAL GMAT TEST TAKER'S QUANT APPROACH:
"i don't want to start working on this problem until i can tell more or less
exactly how the solution is going to proceed. i want to try to see my way through the problem like a chessmaster, four or five 'moves' in advance."
no, no, no. this attitude will KILL you on the quant section.
this sort of forbearance is great for making actual business decisions, on which millions of dollars, not to mention the lives of companies (and their clients), rest. however, on the gmat, this approach is guaranteed to produce exactly one result: you'll use way more time, and accomplish way less, than you need to.
here's the right way to approach the problems.
OPTIMAL GMAT QUANT APPROACH:
have an INSTANT OPENER for every question, and then react to whatever happens from there.
by 'instant opener' i mean that, on EVERY problem, your hand should be moving, working on the problem, within at most 10-15 seconds after you finish reading the problem.
the thing with gmat problems is that they're very versatile; in most cases, just about any opener you can use will work, and most quant problems are more straightforward than you might think once you've opened them successfully.
so this means that
the principal challenge in studying quant problems lies in associating PROBLEM TYPES with OPENERS.
along with that challenge comes the concomitant challenge of
letting yourself start a problem that you don't know how to finish. that sort of attitude is anathema in the business world - no one in their right mind would write a business plan for only the first two phases of a business, for instance - but it's a must for quant success.
here's what you should be able to do, then:
* go through the quant problems in the o.g. at a rate of 100-150 per hour.
* for each problem, try to name an OPENER within ten seconds of the time you finish reading the problem.
- example 1: you see an overlapping sets problem with two sets. opener: "aha, i'm going to make a two-set matrix grid."
- example 2: you see a rate-time-distance problem. opener: "aha, i'm going to make an RTD chart, and let THIS relationship (pointing to one of the relationships in the problem) define my variable."
- example 3: you see a problem with a ratio of 4:5. opener: "ok, i'm going to let
this quantity be 4x, and let
that quantity be 5x."
if you can produce these sorts of openers for EVERY problem within 10-15 seconds, you are going to be in really good shape for the exam. if there are any problems for which you can't produce such openers, and you're just stuck there staring at them, go back and study those problems - AND SIMILAR PROBLEMS - until you
can generate reliable openers.
go for it.
