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Extremely Confused.

Problem Solving — algebra and arithmetic (GMAT Focus Edition)
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Extremely Confused.

by wcgulick » Fri May 29, 2015 4:35 pm
I'll make this as short as possible.

I'm extremely confused by the GMAT math section.

I started out with the Princeton Review book and practice exams + online stuff. I took a few of the online practice tests and got 580-600 (average for the school I want is 604). So I figured I was doing pretty well.
I went to take the real exam (admittedly under conditions I shouldn't have but that's a whole other story) and got 440 overall. I don't remember the individual scores.

So I decided the best way to go about this was to go back and look at what I was doing wrong. This revealed significant weakness in math for inequalities and quadratics. In English the only stumbling block was sentence correction.

So I studied up on where I was going wrong for about a month. In that time I spent maybe an hour total on English and days upon days on math. I even memorized my squares, cubes, rules etc with flash cards.

Then I went to take the exam again. Circumstances were better but the math section consistently threw questions at me that I had NO idea how to answer. In fact of the 37 questions 19 were DS (how does that even happen!?). In the entire exam I found one inequality and three quadratics and I'm pretty sure that I got all of those right. However, my final score was 510, 40 on Verbal and 20 on Quant. So with no studying to speak of I blew the English section out of the water and with massive amounts of studying I bombed the math section. (Also a 6 on the essay and 6 on IR).

So with that essay and 91st percentile on the Verbal I think we can say that I have that down pretty well. I could do a bit better on the IR. However the math section just has me perplexed. I have no idea where I'm going wrong. Obviously I need to retake the exam and work on my math before I do, but I don't even know where to start.

All in all my practice scores are quite good on math, but on the real exam they're apparently awful.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to start attacking this problem?
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Fri May 29, 2015 4:40 pm
To improve your quantitative score, I believe that you should compartmentalize your learning and take the time to master each topic (e.g., percents, ratios, exponents, statistics, etc.). This means that, for each topic, you should:
1) Learn the underlying concepts (rules, attributes, notation, etc.)
2) Learn GMAT-specific strategies related to that topic
3) Practice dozens of questions all related to that one topic.
4) Don't stop working on that topic until you have mastered it

Then, and only then, move on to the next topic.

To help you focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options.

While completing questions from the Official Guide (OG), you should you use an Error Log (aka Improvement Chart). You can find a free downloadable Improvement Chart here: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-error-log. This will help you identify and strengthen your weak areas.

You should also spend a lot of time reviewing the responses from the Experts on this site. They model the steps one should take when tackling math problems.

Finally, you might consider signing up for Beat The GMAT's free 60-Day Study Guide (https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide).
Each day, you'll receive an email with a series of learning activities that guide you, step-by-step, from Day 1 to test day. This will ensure that you will cover everything that the GMAT tests.

Here's an outline of all 60 emails: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-guide-outline

Cheers,
Brent
Brent Hanneson - Creator of GMATPrepNow.com
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by wcgulick » Fri May 29, 2015 5:37 pm
Thanks for your advice.

At this point I guess I don't see much of an alternative due to the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. As I said the practice exams from PR go well, but the real exam does not. There's a disconnect there and it's probably not worth trying to find it. It's probably easier to just start from scratch.

I'll run with your advice. Do you recommend any books over others? Such as Kaplan, Manhattan, PR etc?

Thanks again!
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Fri May 29, 2015 5:45 pm
To help determine the practice test/official test differences, it might be useful to answer a few questions:
- When you wrote the practice tests, did you complete ALL sections, including the AWA and IR sections?
- How did your time management during the practice tests compare with your time management during the official test?
- Did you consistently take practice tests at the same time as your scheduled official test?
- During the test, did you feel anxious/tired/angry/hungry/frustrated/confident?
- Were the conditions at the test center adequate?
- Did you sleep well before the test?

As far as recommended resources go, I'll go with the obvious and recommend ours (GMAT Prep Now).

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by Ian Stewart » Fri May 29, 2015 8:34 pm
wcgulick wrote: the practice exams from PR go well, but the real exam does not.
I don't want to comment about specific companies, but no company test perfectly replicates the real GMAT. None use the real scoring algorithm, and in some lower quality tests, the style of question is so different from the style of real GMAT questions that the test would barely be measuring GMAT ability at all even if the scoring were perfect. I'd suggest:

- for practice tests, primarily use the official GMATPrep tests. There are two free ones, and two more you can buy from mba.com. These tests are the closest approximation of the real thing that you can find.

- for practice questions, use all the official resources you can get - especially the Official Guide, the Quant Review supplement book, and the GMATPrep Question Pack 1. You don't mention consulting official resources at all, and if you haven't, that's a critical gap in your preparation that you'll want to be sure to fill. When you say you were unsure how to answer many of the Quant questions you saw, I'd have to speculate a bit to try to explain why, but I suspect it may be true that you didn't study several common question types that appear on the test. By studying all of the questions in the official books, you'll at least be sure to cover almost all of the standard question types that can appear on the GMAT. You'll still encounter the occasional unusual question, but you'll likely at least have some idea of how to approach almost everything.

- to learn the material, find a good set of books which explains math in a way you understand. The official books unfortunately are poor at that.

The good news is your V40 score is outstanding, and to score that well in Verbal, you must have exceptional conceptual and logical reasoning ability. Those are exactly the skills you need to do well in Quant; it just may take a bit of time to get there. So don't be discouraged, but one thing is clear - the way you've been preparing so far for Quant hasn't worked. So be sure to try something different moving forward. I agree completely with Brent's advice to move systematically from topic to topic. Good luck!
For online GMAT math tutoring, or to buy my higher-level Quant books and problem sets, contact me at ianstewartgmat at gmail.com

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by ceilidh.erickson » Wed Jun 03, 2015 4:41 pm
One thing you didn't mention: how was your timing? When students score low after months of studying, it's often because they ran out of time and didn't get to address the questions at the end. Some people have the opposite problem - rushing too much and making careless errors.

So, here's what you should do:

1) Make sure you have content mastery, as Brent said.

2) Do *timed* sets from the OGs, giving yourself only 2 min per question (on average). So, start with a set of 10 questions in 20 min, then 15 in 30 min, etc.

3) Review your work thoroughly - every question, right or wrong. Keep track of the kinds of mistakes you're making, and ask yourself what you can do to fix them.

Good luck!
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by MartyMurray » Fri Jun 05, 2015 9:22 pm
Here's another way of putting it.

From the sound of it, you haven't been preparing for GMAT quant, really. You have been preparing for Princeton Review quant, which is not quite the same thing. In fact, pretty much no test prep company's questions are exactly like the questions on the actual test and people run into this all the time. They prepare using only the materials from one test prep company, and don't use official CATs or questions, and get a little, or a lot, shocked when they take the real test.

Given that you have done a fair amount of preparation already, maybe your best next step would be to take one of the GMAT Prep tests, which, as another poster mentioned, are the practice tests closest to the real thing. Then you would have a reference point that includes a clearer picture of what the real test is like and some results you could use to assess what to work on.

If you want to take more CATs in addition to the GMAT Prep CATs, Veritas and MGMAT offer some that are pretty accurate.

Funny, if you increase that verbal score a little and get a quant score that matches or comes close, you will be scoring well above what I am guessing is your goal. GMAT quant, the real thing, LOL, isn't so tough, and, as Ian mentioned, if you can rock verbal you already have many of the skills for rocking quant.

Meanwhile, I say so what about 19 DS questions. For one thing 19 is about half of the questions. So that makes sense. For another, if getting 19 DS questions is freaking you out, then you have not really prepared right for this test. After preparing, many people even say they prefer DS questions to PS questions, because DS questions often don't really require calculating the whole way through to an answer.

So there's something right there for you to work on, getting comfortable with DS.

You mentioned flash cards, and that along with the DS issues maybe provides a clue. While getting smoking fast with squares and cubes and stuff is a great idea, this is not a really math test we are talking about, and so your mentioning those flash cards as a highlight of what you worked on may be illuminating. GMAT quant is a reasoning game built of math building blocks. So to increase your score, you need to go beyond understanding the math concepts and get better at playing the game, including the DS part of the game.

Me personally, I would like to see you learn to rock this game and score above 700. Maybe I am being greedy, but anyway with some adjustment to your approach your getting your score well above 600 seems like a lock, doesn't it.
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by Rich@EconomistGMAT » Tue Jun 23, 2015 8:05 am
Hi wcgulick,

It sounds like it might be helpful for you to also consider spending some time reviewing the basics of the concepts you mentioned. Online resources like Khan Academy are a great place to take a step back and really dive into the nitty gritty of how inequalities and quadratics work. Once you've reviewed the concepts themselves, consider diving into more test-taking strategies, versus focusing on just *one* way of solving the questions. You'll find there are many ways to answer a quant question and plenty of online resources will help you get to the answer more quickly.

To help you get started, here's a link to try Economist GMAT Tutor for 7 days, which uses adaptive technology to create a plan specifically tailored to your needs and timeline: https://bit.ly/1bPAHuW

Best of luck,
Rich
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