Achieve a Fuller Understanding of the Material to Improve Your Accuracy on the GMAT

The better you understand the material tested on the GMAT, the more accurate you’ll become. Deep knowledge is a powerful driver of accuracy.

Let’s say you are answering a probability question involving a team that does the same type of job every day. To start, you determined that the probability of completing a job on time on any day is 25/52. In the final step, you must determine the probability of the team finishing on time three days in a row. However, you start to multiply by 52/25, rather than correctly multiplying by 25/52, for a final answer of 25/52.

Here’s the thing: if you truly understand probability, before even starting to make that final calculation, you would understand that if the probability of finishing on time on any day is 25/52, the probability of finishing on time three days in a row must be less than 25/52. So, it’s unlikely that you would make the mistake of choosing 25/52 as your answer.

The point is that the more you understand why you are taking each step in answering a GMAT question, the more likely you are to do it correctly. So, to reduce the probability of careless errors and increase your accuracy, seek to go beyond merely learning formulas and strategies to understanding what underlies them. Make fully understanding the conceptual basis and other aspects of what you do to find correct answers a key part of your GMAT preparation.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep