Your situation is very common among people preparing for the GMAT. The truth of the matter is that EVERYONE struggles with Data Sufficiency (DS) questions at first. Keep in mind that this question type is unique to the GMAT, so it's totally foreign territory.preptobismol wrote:Hi all,
Again, thank you for the help so far! It's made the jump into studying a lot easier for me.
I recently took one official GMAT test as a diagnostic and am hoping for a little feedback on how I should proceed. I scored a 600 (30Q, 42V). Clearly quant is where I need to focus my energy. On the quant I was only able to answer 23 questions before running out of time (10 DS and 13 other) and missed 8 out of 10 data sufficiency questions. I also spent the most time on DS.
How can I improve on DS and will this be enough to bring me into the 700 range? I was surprised by my low quant score as I'm currently an engineering student and am pretty proficient in math.
It just takes time for the concepts and strategies to become secondary, at which point you may come to find that DS questions are actually easier than Problem Solving questions.
I could start listing dozens of DS strategies and common mistakes (like confusing the answer to sufficiency question to the answer to the target question), but it's easier to just direct you to our free set of videos that cover everything you need to know to tackle DS questions: https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gmat-data-sufficiency
Cheers,
Brent