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Need help on practice and test strategy.

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by gmatbeater2007 » Sat May 26, 2007 6:37 am
Hi -

I have a queer problem. Hope to find some help in this forum.

I usually tend to get some wrong answers continuously before I start hitting a 80-90% accuracy. E.g When I start practice, I get 5-6 questions wrong straightaway. Going further I start to build up and start getting 8/10 correct.

I might just be careless. This is a problem for me in practice tests as you are bombarded with SC,RC and CR in a random order. Until I build my focus on one type I have to build up for another and during this time I have already lost focus on the previous type. Then gut feeling and guessing creeps in due to the time pressure, which is disastrous.

What strategy can I apply to overcome this problem? Has anybody on the forum experienced this?

Should I prepare my test scratch pad with all notes that I can before I begin test? On the Test Day, obviously I won't have any warm up period :)

Really need some advice. My test day is 7 weeks away.

Thanks in advance.
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Source: — GMAT Strategy |

by fsar45 » Sun May 27, 2007 8:52 pm
I would recommend practicing only one question type at a time, for at least an hour, every weeknight. Review the errors carefully and see what you're doing wrong. Log them in a spreadsheet to see your patterns and what types of errors you make most often.

Once you're more comfortable with each question type on its own, the change between them on the test won't throw you as much.
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by beatthegmat » Mon May 28, 2007 10:16 am
Very interesting problem. One other suggestion would be to do a couple of practice problems prior to your test? Maybe 10 questions from each topic--that might warm you up sufficiently as well.

Let us know how your test goes, best of luck!
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by Stacey Koprince » Mon May 28, 2007 10:19 pm
Always warm up before you take a test - on the real thing, this will have to be about 1/2 an hour before you get in there, but you definitely need to warm your brain up before the test starts!

One bit of advice: do easy problems in warm up and don't check the answers. You don't want to psych yourself out - the point is just to get warmed up, not to get stressed out or bring yourself down.
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