GMAT Strategy

Hello, i read an article and i would like to share it with you and know what you think about it.

i have read that the best way to do problems is to do a problem set of 37 question, solve each one and check how long it took and write it down, mark the question if you aren't sure or concern it maybe wrong. let these problems set for an afternoon or a day but not more than a day, and when you look back check the answer explanation for the ones you answered incorrectly, the ones you was unsure about & the ones that took too long. Then DO them ALL again.

the article says that this may take longer then the normal way to simply do the problems, glance at the explanations, and move on, but it is more effective, because you can't master a question by solving it just once even if you answered it right.

Do you really think that this way is more effective ?

Azizakaria wrote:Hello, i read an article and i would like to share it with you and know what you think about it.

i have read that the best way to do problems is to do a problem set of 37 question, solve each one and check how long it took and write it down, mark the question if you aren't sure or concern it maybe wrong. let these problems set for an afternoon or a day but not more than a day, and when you look back check the answer explanation for the ones you answered incorrectly, the ones you was unsure about & the ones that took too long. Then DO them ALL again.

the article says that this may take longer then the normal way to simply do the problems, glance at the explanations, and move on, but it is more effective, because you can't master a question by solving it just once even if you answered it right.

Do you really think that this way is more effective ?

I am curious what is the intention for letting the problems set for an afternoon or a day. Reminds me of the recipe for baking a cake haha I usually review my questions right away, and hearing some advice from others, I am going to start keeping an error log for quick reference as well!

[email protected] wrote:Hi Azizakaria,

The questions that you'll face on the Official GMAT tend to fall in a certain 'ratio', so you can't complete 37 random Quant questions and have that score result serve as a reasonable estimate of your ability. In that same way, you also have to complete a FULL CAT - the Essay and IR sections AND an adaptive 37 question Quant section AND an adaptive 41 question Verbal section to end up with a practice CAT score that is reasonably accurate. Reviewing ALL questions will likely be beneficial to you, but to score at a high level, you have to train to use Tactics, rules/content and patterns - and not just learn to handle individual questions that may or may not show up on YOUR Official GMAT.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

This method isn't a replacement to CATs or to determine a score from each problem set, from what I understand it's just a new way to solve problems and learn it's strategies beside the CATs of course.

here's the article link https://www.gmathacks.com/study-tips/how ... blems.html

There are some aspects of what you described that make sense.

For one thing, it is true that you may not have mastered how to answer a question even though you answered it correctly. That's so true.

Do you need to do every one again? I guess not necessarily, but probably doing most of them again makes sense.

I'll add this too. Doing questions, checking the explanations of the ones you missed and moving on definitely does not make sense. Questions that you have missed can be GMAT training gold mines, and just looking at the explanations and moving on is not an effective way to exploit their value. What makes more sense is doing questions, and, after checking them, redoing the ones you missed before looking at the explanations. Generally explanations are best used in the following way.

In the beginning of your prep, when you don't know much, explanations can be useful for learning the basics of how to get right answers. Once you have learned the foundational concepts though, you should really seek to get right answers before looking at explanations to questions you missed, because you need to get practice in coming up with ways to get answers. Figuring out how to get to right answers is what the GMAT is all about, and reading 1000 explanations is not really the way to learn that. In fact I see people who can recite pretty much every explanation to every question around not scoring very high, because they learned all the explanations without learning how to get to answers on their own. You learn that by doing it.

So once you get to a certain point in your preparation, unless you really have no clue at all about what is going on in a question, it often makes the most sense to go to the explanation to get insights AFTER you have found the right answer.

[email protected] wrote:

Azizakaria wrote:
This method isn't a replacement to CATs or to determine a score from each problem set, from what I understand it's just a new way to solve problems and learn it's strategies beside the CATs of course.

Hi Azizakaria,

If it's not a replacement for a CAT, then why is the advice to do 37 questions? Whoever came up with that idea is clearly trying to 'mimic' certain aspects of the Quant section, but there's really no point to doing 37 questions in a row like that unless that set of questions is representative of the 'mix' that you'll see on Test Day.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

thanks for your answer
but, doing 37 questions, is like when someone gave me an advice to make my study sessions 75 min and than take a break for 8 mins and do another session, it's to train myself to be able to focus the whole 75 min, but it's not a replacement for the CAT.