GMAT Strategy

Hello everyone. I am consistently scoring Q50 in GMAT prep and other mocks. But I want to push my quant score to 51. Please suggest the materials or tips I can use to get my target quant score.

I generally complete quants section 10-15 minutes before time and the questions I get wrong are from P&C, probability and geometry. Could you please suggest some materials from where I can practice these topics. I feel the OG-13 questions are not sufficient for these topics.

I would take more time on each question to make sure that you are not making silly mistakes. Luke Rich said, when you are aiming for a score that high there is not room for error. If you are looking for more practice questions MGMAT has an advanced quant book that gives you the most difficult types of questions.

I will give you my take on how to jump from Q50 to Q51. First if you are consistently scoring Q50, then that means you have all the basics and the advanced ideas in place. It is also possible that there may be some subtopics where you are not as strong as others. Clearly beefing up on those would be a good strategy.

As for the specific problem types, there are two category of questions that can hold you back from a Q51. The first ones are the medium level ones where one could misinterpret a statement and fall for a trap. These are problems that you know everything about but still trip on something small and make a mistake. These are really hard to correct, other than having extreme focus and double checking your work. This can happen to anyone on any day. I personally double check the easier problems, because I know I am more likely to miss an easier problem than a hard one. The reason is that the harder ones rely on testing an advanced concept and rely less on how the questions are phrased or need to be interpreted.

The second category of questions that mostly rely on a new idea require you to be fairly flexible in your approach. These questions often rest on testing an idea that you may not have seen before. Of course, they are not entirely new, but are significantly different than what you may have seen in practice tests. To be able to deal with these problems, I generally recommend going one step beyond GMAT, this where others may disagree with me. I will illustrate with an example. Let's say I want to push my understanding of Counting and Number Theory. I would give the following question to a student(Source American Mathematics Competition AMC 12 2003 Problem#23):

How many perfect squares are divisors of the product (1!)(2!)(3!)(4!)(5!)(6!)(7!)(8!)(9!)?

(A) 504 (B) 672 (C) 864 (D) 936 (E) 1008

This problem is beyond what you would encounter on GMAT, however it has the elements of the concepts necessary for the GMAT, and it does an excellent job of forcing you to think and come up with an approach to solve this problem. This struggle that is inherent in solving this problem is extremely valuable for those few hard problems on the GMAT that determine the difference between Q50 and Q51.

Here is the list of advanced questions organized by topic that I believe are relevant for students targeting a Q50/Q51. All of these problems use the same concepts that are required on the GMAT, I made sure to only select those that are relevant. However, some of these are fairly challenging and will require a certain level of ingenuity. I recommend that you struggle with them to gain the most.

https://www.gmatquantum.com/amc-questions

Cheers,
Dabral

the questions I get wrong are from P&C, probability and geometry. Could you please suggest some materials from where I can practice these topics. I feel the OG-13 questions are not sufficient for these topics.

At Veritas Prep we have a very well-regarded book dedicated to statistics, permutations/ combinations, and probabilities. It should give you all the practice that you need in those areas! These are the most difficult questions available for these topics.

Here is the link to the newest edition on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Veritas-Prep-Stat ... babilities