GMAT Strategy

Happy to help!

1. In terms of time spent to study - you have to make sure that you're using the time in the best way. The quality of your study is at least as important as the quantity of your study. I don't know whether you also have a full time job (if so, 6-7 hours is way too much on days you work!), but generally speaking, one study session should not last longer than 2 hours. You can have multiple study sessions in one day, if you want, but you should take at least a 2 hour break between study sessions. Basically, your brain needs time to process what you've been studying and make sure that it gets into your long-term memory in an effective way.

2. I personally prefer to cover just math or just verbal in a single study session, but I think that's an individual choice - it depends on what you think works best for you. At the end of one study session, take 5-10 minutes to write some notes on what you learned during that session, both about the test and about yourself as a test-taker. Note anything that you want to review further. At the beginning of each study session, review the notes from your last few study sessions to help decide what to do during that next study session.

3. If you don't like your SC score yet, then you aren't done studying OG. Make sure you are studying not just the right answers but also the wrong answers - be able to point to the specific errors and be able to articulate why each error is an error. Ideally, if you can study with someone else, that will be helpful, but if not, literally talk aloud and explain to the air, or your cat, or your TV, why a particular wrong answer is wrong. If you can explain, you know that you understand that concept. If you can't, then you know you need to go back to your SC guide or to the forums here to ask a question. Also, keep an error log. Every time you make a mistake, ask yourself "what mistake did I make?", "WHY did I make that mistake?", and "What could I do to minimize the chances of making that same mistake in the future?" Write down or type your responses to those questions. When appropriate, return to your SC guide for review or rules. When appropriate, make a flash card to study whatever caused you to make the mistake. When appropriate, come and ask questions here about the issue. (All of this, by the way, can be applied to any question type or content area.)

4. I don't recommend the Challenge Questions to my own students because I think they are mostly much harder than anything that would show up on the real test. As such, I don't think they are the best use of your time - you want practice questions to mimic the real test as much as possible. Having said that, I sometimes get students who are amazing at math and find all of the OG stuff way too easy. In that case, you might enjoy the Challenge Questions - but, otherwise, you'll most likely just stress yourself out for no good reason!

Don't worry about asking questions here in a thread started by another student - that's exactly why these forums are public! You can give each other good ideas as well.

Generally speaking, when you're first learning a new concept or question type, you should do some problems just one at a time, with review immediately after. I have mentioned before that I can take 10 minutes to review one problem, but I don't always take 10. You may take only a few minutes to review a particular problem or you may take up to 10 on a particularly "rich" problem; that depends on the problem itself.

Once you've learned the basic concepts (facts being tested) and techniques (for the different question types), you should start doing sets of problems. In one two-hour study session, you could do a set of 20 problems (which takes 40 minutes) and then spend the rest of the time reviewing those problems. At first, you might want to do a set of 20 problems from only one broad category (eg, number properties problems) - then one of the things you like for during review is connections between similar problems. As time goes on, you should start doing random mixed sets (from all content areas) because you also need to develop the skill to tell what an unknown problem is during the first 10-20 seconds.

I also recommend taking about 10 minutes at the end of a study session to write or type some notes on what you learned during that session, both about the test and about yourself as a test-taker. Also include in the notes any major things that you want to make sure to remember going forward, and any major things that you want to review at some later date.

Then, at the start of a new study session, review the notes from the previous 3 sessions to remind yourself about those things. (I personally prefer doing this in an electronic file because I find it easier to keep the notes straight and go back and review - but that's a personal choice.)

I also love the flashcard technique - if flashcards work for you, then definitely use them.

Finally, it's important to pay attention to the quality of your study as you go along, and you can typically gauge this by your improvement (or lack thereof) on practice tests. Generally speaking, practice tests should be taken roughly every 3 weeks (if you are studying every day or almost every day). If you aren't seeing at least some improvement AND you can't figure out why, then you need to reexamine how you're studying. (Note: you may not improve on a test but realize, say, that you messed up your timing and had to guess a lot at the end - so now you know why. You may have learned the math and verbal concepts and techniques you wanted to learn before that test but then messed up on the timing, so now you know that you have to work more on the timing aspects before your next test.)

1) Oh - in our strategy guides, we categorize all of the OG questions, but if you don't have those guides, then you'll just have to do random problem sets. In that case, do two things: first, don't do 20 problems in a row - jump around to ensure that you're trying different difficulty levels. At the end of a few days, after doing several sets of random OG questions, then start looking for connections among problems. It'll be a little harder because you'll have to be looking within a larger set of problems, but you can still do it.

2) You should still try some of the easy ones just to make sure that you really are okay with the concepts and techniques, but don't stop with easy ones - try medium ones also (and possibly some more difficult ones if you really feel good about that particular problem type or content area). Also, as you noted, you're not always using the best strategy on the easy ones. Generally speaking, when you figure out the best strategy for any level problem, that will also help you to think about how to tackle the next level up (for similar problems). So learning to do the easy ones with the best strategy is very helpful in learning to do the medium ones with the best strategy, and so on. Finally, remember that, as you get better, the test gives you a harder mix of problems - in order to both get to harder problems and have a shot at them, you have to make sure to you can do the easier problems in less than 2 minutes and without any mistakes.

I'm just adding that last part because sometimes people think they don't need to worry about getting better at easier problems - they mostly get them right anyway in 2 minutes. But it's actually really important from a strategic standpoint b/c if you're making careless mistakes even sometimes on lower level problems, it's difficult to lift yourself to the hardest problems you're capable of doing. Plus, you want to save 15 or 30 seconds whenever you can because you're going to want to use that extra time on the hardest of problems!

3) I do think it's a good idea to have review study sessions. Generally, you should study 6 days a week. One of those days should be all about reviewing both what you're currently working on and everything you've done to date. Now, you can't review literally everything in one study session - that's where your study notes come in. Use them to help you decide what you want to review for this particular review session. But you'll probably need to do a bit more than just study flashcards.

Re: flashcards with full problems and solutions written out - it is generally a good idea to have flashcards that are more at a "key concept" level. Rather than having a full math solution written out, for example, you might write out:
- what category is this problem (for question type and content area)
- what sub-categories (eg, if the question type is DS, is it a yes/no or value question?)
- how to recognize what to do (eg, the question is a "theory" question from number properties, so the most efficient way for me is to try some different types of numbers - and, in particular, the problem has absolute value symbols, so I probably want to try some positive and negative numbers)
- how to make an educated guess (eg, I know I can get rid of AD because statement 1 is not sufficient but I don't know how to deal with statement 2... BUT I can tell that statement 2 tells me everything statement 1 already told me, plus some additional information. So C isn't the right answer b/c C requires that both pieces of information be separately useful in some way., and statement 1 isn't separately useful if statement 2 tells me the same info plus more. So I'm going to guess either B or E)
- any careless mistakes that I tend to make over and over on problems of this type, so that I can be aware enough to spot the situation and be extra careful I don't make a mistake
- etc

In other words, it's really about how to think about the problem. If you can know how to recognize what to do, then the rest (the actual steps) should follow.