How to Master the Basics
Ive been thinking all day about what topic to choose for this weeks article, and I finally realized that the topic has been staring me right in the face! Were deep in the details of a major update to our Foundations of Math Strategy Guide (we have to send it to the printer in T-minus-158-hours-and-counting!), so Ive been editing practice drill sets for a week, and last week, we talked about how to create a study cheat sheet. I realized that a perfect follow-up would be: what do you do when you realize that you arent skilled enough with the mechanics of certain tasks or operations?
Creating your cheat sheet might help you to know that you need more practice quickly and efficiently converting from fractions to decimals to percents, for example, but the cheat sheet itself will only take you so far. Sometimes, we also need to drill! As the word implies, drilling means doing something repeatedly until we master it so well that we could do it half-asleep.
Now, it would be lovely to be able to do that for every last bit of the material tested on this exam, but lets face it theres a limit to how much we can remember and theres also a limit to how much time we went to spend studying for this test. So today were going to talk about how to master the basics, because we know that, at the least, we have to master the basics in order to earn the more advanced material on the test.
How do I get started?
If you havent already, read through the Cheat Sheet article. This is one of the ways in which you might identify certain areas that would benefit from drilling. (Though there are all kinds of ways to identify these areas from your Error Log, if youre keeping one, from your CAT analysis, even just from your daily study and practice, when you notice certain bad patterns or mistakes.)
As you move through your material, youre naturally going to identify certain areas where you either make too many mistakes, are too inefficient, or both. Some of these areas are going to be what we call Foundational Skills and these foundational skills typically lend themselves well to the practice of drilling.
What are foundational skills?
Foundational skills are typically skills that are needed to answer a question, but theyre just some kind of starting point youll need these skills plus more in order to answer the question. This might best be explained by example. For example, you wont see any GMAT questions that ask you simply to add some fractions together and nothing else. You will, however, see many questions that require you to add some fractions together and do other things. If you cant add the fractions, you cant even get to the harder stuff thats going on in the problem.
By the same token, sentence correction questions never ask you Whats the subject of this sentence? but it can often be helpful and sometimes absolutely critical! to be able to identify that subject. Similarly, critical reading questions often require us to unravel a chain of events to find the logical conclusion in an argument, but thats usually just the first step to answering the question.
All of these skills have something in common: theyre what we can call mechanical. That is, once you learn the process for how to add fractions, or how to identify a subject or conclusion, the process itself doesnt change much. If you can master that mechanical process, then youve mastered some basics that are necessary to get you to the next level on a question.
When youre reviewing problems, ask yourself: What are the basic skills I need to have in order to be able to answer this? If youre falling short on anything that we could consider mechanical, then youre going to need to figure out how to drill that skill until you feel that you are both accurate and efficient.
Where do I find these drills?
You dont want to drill foundational skills on full Official Guide (or GMAT-like) questions. Save those for after youve mastered the foundations otherwise, youre mostly wasting valuable questions.
Appropriate drills have several characteristics. They will begin by cleanly testing you on one fundamental skill (such as adding fractions). Later questions in the set, or later sets, might require you to mix skills (e.g., adding and multiplying) in one problem. The drills will also test you repeatedly (practice makes perfect!); there should be at least 5 questions in each drill set. Finally, ideally, the drill sets should have explanations, not just answers after all, if you make a mistake or need help with something, the answer by itself isnt quite enough.
If you want to see examples of what good drill sets look like, go to Amazon and look up our Foundations of Math and Foundations of Verbal Strategy Guides. You can view the first chapter of each book; the quant drill sets are located at the end of the chapter and the verbal drill sets are spread throughout the chapter.
You should also be able to expand as you see fit. If you finish a drill set and want more, but dont have anything else from your current source, identify a second source of good problems. This might be another GMAT-specific book, but for quant and grammar, you can also use standard math and grammar textbooks for basic drills. There are even some good free quant drills available online if you search around. Just make sure you have a good source for your first set, and then youll find it easier to identify other good sources because youll know what good questions look like!
How do I drill?
Now that youve got what you need, how to you actually sit down and drill? To start, do 5 to 10 questions in a sitting, but check your answer after every question. If necessary, read the explanation carefully, identify any errors that you made, re-do the work, and so on before you move on to the next problem. Do NOT do all 5 or 10 in a row and then check your work if you are doing something incorrectly, you will now have done it incorrectly 5 or 10 times in a row. That builds a bad habit, not a good one!
Once you feel that you have gotten better, you may want to try 5 in a row without stopping between questions but dont do that until you feel reasonably confident that you can get all of the questions right. (You still might make mistakes, of course; we all do.)
Note: the answers to drill sets will often be listed closely together in the answer key. You may need to use your hand or a piece of paper to cover up the answer to the next problem so that you dont inadvertently see it while checking the answer to the previous problem.
And thats it! Now you know how to drill your foundational skills. Have at it!