Hey, just looking for an expert's opinion on making silly mistakes during the actual exam. I just reviewed all of my test questions I missed during my GMATprep practice test. I can easily figure them all out on my own after the test; thus, I am assuming maybe this is a time issue or an anxiety on the actual test issue. Does anyone have any advice in dealing with this or have had students who have encountered similar issues? I believe if I cut out the silly mistakes (for example missed a DS question that asked about consecutive numbers in a arithmetic mean situation and I did not catch it said consecutive) I believe I could get a 700+ as it is not the content that I do not understand, but merely these silly errors I keep making. Any advice is always appreciated as I know your time is valuable. Thanks so much![/b]
Hey Bpolley,
This is, of course, a very common issue. The thing to remember is that the GMAT is more of a trick-based test than a knowledge-based test, so silly mistakes are often more common than simply not knowing how to do a question. What's important is to recognize that silly mistakes are actually based on more fundamental issues than you might think.
The most important issue is process. If you're making silly mistakes regularly, the odds are good that your process is not yet solid. Are you approaching every single Data Sufficiency question the exact same way? Do you use the same notation system? Can you look back at your notes and see your process in motion?
This is issue #2 for the silly-mistake crowd. Oftentimes, silly mistakes get made because your work isn't clear, even to yourself. If your handwriting is tiny, or gigantic, or all over the page at different angles, or you try to squish way too much into every page, that could have something to do with all your errors.
Finally, there's the possibility that your arithmetic skills aren't quite up to par, so when you try to speed through what should be easy calculations, you make a mistake. If you were a student in my class, I'd hand you our Foundations of Math book, which is really just a book with hundreds and hundreds of little arithmetic/algebra questions, and tell you to do every drill until you never made a SINGLE mistake on them. If you ever made a mistake, I'd have you redo the ENTIRE drill.
Let me know if that all makes sense, or if you have any follow-up questions!
-t
