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Grid for practice CAT exam?

by 7OO » Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:22 am
Hello - I wrote about my first CAT practice exam experience earlier (see below). Right now, I'm attempting to correct/analyze the exam. I have a question: can/should I use a grid to go through my errors? I know a lot of people use those for practice problems, but I'm not sure if it would be helpful for the practice CAT - any thoughts? (also, PR provides a score report/breakdown of how you do so not sure if doing one myself would be a waste of my time..?). Thanks!


Hey everyone, I look my very first practice GMAT exam today: Princeton Review CAT #1

I got a 580 (39Q, 31V).
My goal is to get a 700 on the GMAT.

I'm not at all surprised by my PR CAT score. It was my first practice exam so my timing/pacing was all over the place. For the quant section I had about 15 minutes left for the last 10 questions. Needless to say, I got 4 out of those last 10 wrong (I think I guessed on 3 of those). As for the verbal section, I completely lost my focus and motivation. I wanted to hit "end test" about 20 times (because I was tired/bored and wanted to go do something else) while working on the section. I finished with 27 mins. remaining. Not ideal - but I guess better than quitting halfway through, right?

Anyway, that's my first CAT experience. Lots of work to be done. I need to build up my stamina (obviously) and take these CAT exams more seriously. But, I think - because it was my first practice test - I just wanted to get a feel for where I stood... so at least now I know.

I'm going to review the exam either later today or tomorrow and try and determine my weak spots.

Any advice for how to stay focused and get through the CATs? Just practice? Lots of discipline? HA Thanks.
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by beatthegmat » Sun Jan 27, 2008 9:19 pm
Using a practice grid to analyze your practice sets and practice tests is really smart. A lot of successful self studiers emphasize lots of analysis for their errors after going through practice.

You can get a GRID from this site, https://del.icio.us/beatthegmat

Good luck!
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by 7OO » Mon Jan 28, 2008 4:05 am
beatthegmat wrote:Using a practice grid to analyze your practice sets and practice tests is really smart. A lot of successful self studiers emphasize lots of analysis for their errors after going through practice.

You can get a GRID from this site, https://del.icio.us/beatthegmat

Good luck!
Ah! Thanks so much, Eric
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by mayonnai5e » Mon Jan 28, 2008 1:41 pm
There are two methods of tracking your errors. The first and most common is to use the grid found on this forum. It helps you create a detailed breakdown of your weaknesses. The other is to just keep track of your basic hit rates. The latter is what I did during my practice. Why? Because, to me, it didn't matter if I knew that I got 60% of geometry questions right or 30% right. The only thing that mattered was that I was getting geometry questions wrong! And a lot of them! So 20% right, 30% right, 60% right...that doesn't matter when you're trying to hit 700 because any of those low hit rates will hold you down. And the most important thing was that it was taking too much time tracking all that information; I'd rather spend that additional time analyzing solutions and what I was doing wrong. You just need a rough idea of which topics are giving you problems - not precise numbers.
https://www.beatthegmat.com/my-blog-erro ... t4899.html
550 =\ ...560 =\... 650 =) ...570 =( ...540 =*( ...680 =P ... 670 =T ...=T... 650 =T ...700 =) ..690 =) ...710 =D ...GMAT 720 DING!! ;D

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by 7OO » Mon Jan 28, 2008 3:11 pm
mayonnai5e wrote:There are two methods of tracking your errors. The first and most common is to use the grid found on this forum. It helps you create a detailed breakdown of your weaknesses. The other is to just keep track of your basic hit rates. The latter is what I did during my practice. Why? Because, to me, it didn't matter if I knew that I got 60% of geometry questions right or 30% right. The only thing that mattered was that I was getting geometry questions wrong! And a lot of them! So 20% right, 30% right, 60% right...that doesn't matter when you're trying to hit 700 because any of those low hit rates will hold you down. And the most important thing was that it was taking too much time tracking all that information; I'd rather spend that additional time analyzing solutions and what I was doing wrong. You just need a rough idea of which topics are giving you problems - not precise numbers.
Hi mayonnai5e - any advice on how to keep track of my "hit rates"? Do I have to use excel for that? I'm not quite for how to go about figuring that out. Thanks much for your advice - I think I'll try out both at first and see which one works for me.... but the "hit rate" strategy sounds like a good plan since i'd rather (like you said) not waste any time that I don't need to!
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by mayonnai5e » Mon Jan 28, 2008 4:24 pm
It's basically just keeping track of your percentage correct. Let's say you do a set of 40 questions for the night at medium difficulty. If you missed 4 then you achieved a 90% hit rate. That's it. I just did that for every session. As you progress you can also keep cumulative hit rates - percentage correct over all the questions you've done. If you see your hit rates dip for a set of questions then you know you need to work a little more in that area. For example, in my final session of DS my hit rate went down to 57% (from a previous high of 89%) so I changed my focus in the last few weeks to quant.
https://www.beatthegmat.com/my-blog-erro ... t4899.html
550 =\ ...560 =\... 650 =) ...570 =( ...540 =*( ...680 =P ... 670 =T ...=T... 650 =T ...700 =) ..690 =) ...710 =D ...GMAT 720 DING!! ;D

Learn more about me
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by 7OO » Mon Jan 28, 2008 4:42 pm
mayonnai5e wrote:It's basically just keeping track of your percentage correct. Let's say you do a set of 40 questions for the night at medium difficulty. If you missed 4 then you achieved a 90% hit rate. That's it. I just did that for every session. As you progress you can also keep cumulative hit rates - percentage correct over all the questions you've done. If you see your hit rates dip for a set of questions then you know you need to work a little more in that area. For example, in my final session of DS my hit rate went down to 57% (from a previous high of 89%) so I changed my focus in the last few weeks to quant.
Ah well that's easy enough. :) haha.
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