Quant: Good in practice, bad in tests...

Hi shmoowalker,

Many Test Takers take the approach that you've described, but trying to mimic a Quant section in practice never quite works the way that you think it will. Here's why:

1) To mirror Test Day (or a FULL practice CAT), you actually have to go through an Essay and IR section (and an 8-minute break) BEFORE you start the Quant. The mental fatigue that comes with dealing with that first hour of the GMAT WILL impact how you perform on the Quant (and later, how you perform on the Verbal).

2) The practice questions that you've selected to complete in 75 minutes do NOT adapt to your performance, nor do they likely match the "ratio" of question types that you'll see on a fully adaptive exam.

Since the issue is really about how you're performing on your CATs, the first logical step is to do a full question-by-question review of the entire section. Make note of the questions that you got wrong and WHY you got them wrong. How many did you get wrong because of a silly/little mistake? How many did you get wrong because the question was too hard? Did you have a pacing problem and did you have to guess on a bunch of questions at the end just to finish? Etc. Properly defining (and fixing) those little mistakes should be a part of your study process. From there, you might need to invest in some new GMAT resources to help you to improve.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

I'll echo what Rich said and say that the computer adaptive nature of the GMAT pretty much ensures that EVERYONE is struggling within 4 to 8 questions of a section. In other words, pretty much every question you'll see on test day will very difficult....for you. So, when you say that you tackle questions that medium to hard, you need to recognize that you won't see many questions that you feel are of medium difficulty.

You should also keep in mind that the GMAT is a test of your math and verbal skills AND it's a test of your test-taking skills (endurance, time management, anxiety managemement), so, it may be the case that you need the most work on your test-taking skills.

To identify where you need the most work, take FULL-LENGTH practice tests and carefully analyze them afterwards.

During this analysis, there are four main types of weakness to watch out for:
1. specific Quant skills/concepts (e.g., algebra, standard deviation, etc.)
2. specific Verbal skills/concepts (e.g., verb tenses, assumption CR questions, etc.)
3. test-taking skills (time management, endurance, anxiety etc.)
4. silly mistakes

For the first two weaknesses, the fix is pretty straightforward. Learn the concept/skill and find some practice questions to strengthen that weakness. To focus on one topic at a time, you can use BTG's tagging feature to isolate one concept. For example, here are all of the questions tagged as statistics questions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/forums/tags/ ... statistics
See the left side of that linked page for more tag options.

If your test-taking skills are holding you back, then you need to work on these. For example, we have a free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244.

Finally, if silly mistakes are hurting your score, then it's important that you identify and categorize these mistakes so that, during tests, you can easily spot situations in which you're prone to making errors. I write about this and other strategies in the following article for BTG: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/09/ ... n-the-gmat

Cheers,
Brent