GMAT Strategy

I have taken 4 practice exams thus far (my G-Day is this Friday). I have been sort of cramming for reasons that would take too long to explain on this forum. My scores from the practice exams are as follows:

GMATPrep1 (relatively no studying):620 (Q44,V31)
MGMAT 1: 690 (Q43,V40)
MGMAT 2: 640 (Q43,V34)
GMATPrep2 (today): 660 (Q42,V39)

My SC accuracy has vaulted from 5/15 correct on the first test, then 6/15 on the 2nd, then 7/15 on the 3rd, to 13/17 correct on today's GMATPrep2! Much thanks to MGMAT SC guide!

However, as you can see, my Quant score has actually decreased since my first practice test (where I didn't even study!). This scares me. I am CONSTANTLY (every practice exam so far) guessing on the last 3-5 questions. On today's practice, I literally had to fill in random answers on the last 3 questions with the seconds ticking down to avoid leaving any blank. Inherently, I almost always get these guesses wrong.

What can I do to speed up my pace?!! On Verbal I've taught myself to slow down to avoid dumb mistakes because I usually end up with 10 minutes to spare regardless.

Am I just being too indecisive on correct questions? I do find myself "doing the problem twice" sometimes when it seems too easy to be true. But this usually results in me scoring well. On my most recent practice exam today, I started off with 15-16 correct in the first 20 questions. Then, when I realized my pace was slow, I had to speed up and ended up getting 10-11 of the final 17 questions INCORRECT. I find myself with only about 20 minutes left when I cross the 20 questions mark (a little over 1 question per minute for the remaining 17 questions...vs. almost 3 minutes per question for the first 20). I inevitably rush in the 2nd half of Quant and my score plummets.

I'm considering a new strategy where I just go with my gut instinct and not overthink the problem, so that I can have time on the back end of the Quant section. Smart idea or not?

THIS FRIDAY IS G-DAY, any last minute tips or help would be greatly appreciated. Anything to lower the stress level will be welcomed at this point. Sorry for the long post; I suppose it was a way to vent. Close friends/relatives got tired of hearing about the GMAT after a week or so lol.

Hey ajelias,

Congratulations on some great practice test scores heading into Friday!

Some quick advice I have for you heading into your test... Just because pacing problems don't only affect the last few on which you guess, but probably add stress and haste throughout the test, I'd recommend just giving yourself 2-3 "pass" questions on which, after a few seconds and a little panic of "how am I going to solve this", you CHOOSE to STRATEGICALLY guess and move on. This way, you save some time so that you can take most of the test more comfortably, and you can move on confidently knowing that it was part of your strategy and not a last-ditch panic move.

Right now you're in great shape compared with most test-takers - you can pretty comfortably and reasonably handle 33-34 pretty hard quant problems in 75 minutes. Rather than rush through those and expose yourself to mistakes on all 36-37 you'd get to by rushing, with 2 study days left I'd just accept that that's a really good place to be and plan on a quick guess on 2-3 of the questions that are bound to be time-suckers (and that you may not end up with better than 20% odds of getting right anyway) and use that time to do the absolute best you can on those problems that you should get right.

Your story about today's test, I think, supports that - once you started rushing it affected nearly all the questions you faced past that point and you still had to guess on a few. You might as well plan on a pretty lousy chance of getting, say, 3 question right, but use that extra 5-6 minutes to keep doing your due diligence and getting most of the others right. One man's opinion, but I've seen that work for a lot of students and it helps to manage both haste and panic.

Thanks for the quick reply Brian!

The egotistical side of me wants to never give up on a question, but I'm starting to really see how beneficial your strategy can be. Usually I face 3-4 problems on each practice test that EVEN AFTER 2+ minutes of working through, I still don't know what the heck to do. I plan on taking another practice exam either tomorrow or Thursday (side question-do you suggest staying away from practice tests the day before the real test?) and I will try out the new strategy.

I think it could really help. I get almost all of the questions in the "600-650" difficulty correct, UNLESS I'm faced with a time crunch. So wasting time on hard problems early on (and still getting them wrong) is killing me when I get to the medium problems at the end of the test because I have no time to spend on them. And as we all know, getting lower difficulty problems wrong hurts you even more than getting a hard problem wrong. That's what I see happening to my percentile towards the last 10-15 questions of the Quant section (per MGMAT's thorough assessment summaries).

I will definitely try this strategy out. In case you didn't see my side question above..do you suggest staying away from practice tests/cramming the day before the exam? Or will it be beneficial to see if I can improve my Quant score using this strategy, therefore boosting my confidence for G-Day?

My test is early next week, and I'm pretty much in the same boat with almost the same scores.
I know exactly what you mean when you speak about ego coming in the way of leaving a question. You suddenly tend to feel that not answering this question is a blot on your IQ (though not consciously! )

Brian's strategy makes perfect sense. I tried it last Sunday when I wrote my final GMAT Prep, and it worked. You haven't mentioned in your post whether you've been able to train your internal clock while studying to alarm you in 2 mins. It's a big bonus if you have done so. If you haven't, I wouldn't sweat it. I'd just take a couple of questions in the forum and sit with it tomorrow morning, only to guage the per-question-timing. Just before starting a question, you might want to spend 2 seconds and tell yourself "I WILL QUIT in 2 mins IF NEED BE." And you'd want to put a hard stop on a question after the internal time limit, unless you are seconds away from an answer.
It helped me beat my ego and pacing problem to a certain extent. It's a different story that my accuracy has taken a slight dip, but I know that it's part of my strategy. Overall, I feel more confident.

I wouldn't recommend that you take any more tests for any reason. Surely, you can't have takeaways tomorrow. Your last day is better spent consolidating whatever you have gathered over the span of your preparation time. And a potential loss of confidence IFF you get a bad score tomorrow is not worth risking. Your practice scores are pretty good, and on a good day with high confidence, you are enroute to a stellar GMAT.

All the best brother! Be sure to let us know how it goes...

itheenigma, when you say Brian's strategy worked, what exactly do you mean in a quantifiable sense? Did your Quant score increase by 2+ points?

One GMAT Prep test is too small a sample size to be attributing quantifiable score increases to a particular strategy.

But like I told you, I can vouch for the 'soft' benefits. It helped me beat my ego and pacing problem to a certain extent. It's a different story that my accuracy has taken a slight dip, but I know that it's part of my strategy. Overall, I feel more confident.