OG hit rate drop with harder questions and timing

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mayonnai5e: Legendary Member; Posts: 1018; Joined: Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:19 pmFollowed by: 6 members; Thanked: 86 times

by mayonnai5e » Tue Sep 18, 2007 3:36 pm

Hello everyone,

Just wanted some ideas on where to proceed from here with my DS work. Here my are hit rates for the DS portion of the OG:

1-35 94% (untimed)
36-75 95% (untimed)
76-115 75% (timed!)
116-155 57.5% (timed!)

So as you can see, as the problems got progressively harder my hit rate plummeted more and more. The time pressure definitely had a hand in the hit rate change (I did 13 questions of the DS section of the diagnostic test and only missed 1 and those are supposedly the hardest math questions in the book, but that was untimed).

Anyways, what I'm looking for are suggestions on how to specifically improve my DS hit rate under timed pressure.

My only plan right now is to just practice hard Qs from the MGMAT CATs, the Kaplan 800 book, and the Difficult Math document found on the wiki. Any DS gurus have any insights?

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Source: Beat The GMAT — Data Sufficiency | Tue Sep 18, 2007 3:36 pm

Prasanna: Master | Next Rank: 500 Posts; Posts: 418; Joined: Mon Feb 26, 2007 6:41 pm; Thanked: 24 times

by Prasanna » Tue Sep 18, 2007 9:00 pm

mayonnai5e

I am definitely not a DS guru...but just want to share my experience.I had a similar problem during my prep. My DS hit rate reduced on the later questions on OG. I did couple of things

- Identified the traps set by the DS questions. There are not many I would say..You need to have a strategy for the major quesiton types. For example, the inequality question always troubled me. So I focued on that and understood the approach to be taken. It did happen that even after the extra prep, my hit rate only improved marginally over DS questions. I made mistakes on the same questions too

- I strongly felt practice will improve my accuracy. Hence I kept on working problems. This did help me. I may not have the best approach to solve the problem but I got used to finding the traps as soon as I read the question. This helped me in a great way..

Towards the end of prep..my accuracy rates stayed high at around 90% on any test I took

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12345: Junior | Next Rank: 30 Posts; Posts: 19; Joined: Wed May 27, 2009 3:52 pm

by 12345 » Tue Jul 07, 2009 4:39 am

Hi Prasanna

"Identified the traps set by the DS questions. There are not many I would say" - can you pls elaborate on this, do you have a doc you can share with the traps set by DS questions?

thx

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