I just Beat The GMAT!

I received a PM asking me to respond.

I'm sorry that you didn't get the score you wanted when you took the test. It looks like your verbal score actually went up compared to your practice tests, so congrats on that and keep up the good work! On quant, your score dropped rather significantly, so we need to figure out why.

Actually, from what you wrote, I think we already know why: your timing was a major problem. You had to guess randomly on the last 5-7 questions, and then the very last question was left blank. On the 5-7 on which you guessed randomly, your penalty probably worked out to about 2 to 2.5 percentile points per question answered incorrectly. (This depends on a lot of variables, obviously - how many you got right vs. wrong, whether any were experimental, what the difficulty levels were, in what order you got things right and wrong, etc.) That last one that you left blank would've resulted in about a 3 percentile point cut.

So we're looking at maybe a best-case-scenario ~10 percentile drop and worst case closer to 20 percentile points. Which explains at least half of your quant drop and possibly pretty much the whole thing.

I'm also guessing, by the way, that you started speeding up even before you needed to start guessing randomly, so you also probably lost some points due to speed errors sometime before you even got to the random portion. This would contribute even more to the end-of-test score decline.

The good news is: timing is generally very fixable. You just have to do the work.

So, what to do? Well, you need to fix this timing problem on the quant. If you don't fix it, you're not going to reach your goal. You mention spending 2 and at most 3 minutes on quant, but if you had to guess completely randomly on 5-7 questions then you're either not cutting yourself off on earlier questions as you thought you were or you're going to 3 min on most of the questions! (You should be going to 3 min maybe once or twice per section - that's it.)

(Oh, just a quick aside. Most people get about the same number of questions wrong regardless of scoring level - "percentage correct" is not how the test is scored. The test is scored based upon the difficulty level of the questions. So that person who got 16 wrong and scored Q44 was answering harder questions than you were answering.)

What have you been using for practice tests? If you have not been using something that shows you how much time you spend per question, then start using a test that does give you this data. My company's tests do give you that data and I'm sure other companies do the same - check it out on the various company websites. GMATPrep does not give you this data, unfortunately.

When you do problems, start doing this exercise with a stopwatch. If you don't have one already, buy yourself a stopwatch with lap timing capability. When you go to do a set of problems, start the stopwatch but turn it over so you can't see the time. Every time you think one minute has gone by, push the lap button. When you're done, see how good you were - and whether you tend to over or underestimate. Get yourself to the point where you're within 15 seconds either way on a regular basis (that is, you can generally predict between 45 sec and 1min 15 sec).

If you're not on track by one minute, make an educated guess and move on. (The general idea is that if you're not on track by the halfway mark, you're unlikely to figure out what's holding you back AND have time to do the whole problem in the 1 min you have left.)

Remember that, no matter how good you get, you will still have to guess on something like 5 to 7 questions in the math section.  You don't want to be forced into making those guesses in a row at the end of the section, as happened last time, so choose the 5-7 hardest questions AS YOU SEE THEM throughout the section.  Remind yourself that you CANNOT get to the point where you can answer everything given to you in 2 min - that's just not how the test works.  You have to let those go.

Instead, learn how to make effective educated guesses, in particular on those types of problems for which you tend to get sucked in.  (And look at your practice test results to figure out which question types those are - DS or PS? alg. vs. geom vs. word problems vs. stats vs. fractions & percents vs. number properties? And if you can get even more specific than that, do so. Then, when a problem that is in your "danger zone" pops up, be even more careful not to go way over on time.

Finally, you specifically asked me about the Kaplan materials in your PM. I can't comment because I haven't used them myself - I'll leave that to others who have used the materials.