question about hit rate

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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 » Mon Jul 16, 2007 2:23 pm

so i've read from several posts about the goal of increasing your hit rate. i was wondering why that should be the main goal/focus of our studies. on my gmatprep 1 test i missed 17 out of the 37 Q problems and received a 45 score which is decent i think. my hit rate wasn't particularly great, but the score turned out okay. is a high hit rate related to answering more questions consecutively so you can reach the harder questions? or is there some other reason why this should be one of the most important goals?

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Source: Beat The GMAT — GMAT Strategy | Mon Jul 16, 2007 2:23 pm

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Stacey Koprince: GMAT Instructor; Posts: 2228; Joined: Wed Dec 27, 2006 3:28 pmFollowed by: 694 members; Location: Montreal, Canada; Thanked: 639 times; GMAT Score:780

by Stacey Koprince » Mon Jul 16, 2007 8:01 pm

If people are talking about hit rate in terms of percentage correct, then they are focusing on the wrong thing - you're going to get lots of questions wrong. We all do. The difference is in the difficulty level of the questions we answer.

So, if people are talking about lifting their ability to answer more difficult questions, then yes. That's what studying is all about.

Don't forget, by the way, that you have to get better at doing the questions you already know how to do in order to be able to answer more difficult questions. You can't afford careless mistakes on ones you can do, because then you may not get yourself to a higher level to be offered harder questions. And you also have to learn to be more efficient at the ones you can already do, because the harder they get, the more time they take on average - so you really have to be able to fly through the ones that are below your level (or the level you're hoping to get to).

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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 Jul 17, 2007 1:05 am

Stacey Koprince wrote:If people are talking about hit rate in terms of percentage correct, then they are focusing on the wrong thing - you're going to get lots of questions wrong. We all do. The difference is in the difficulty level of the questions we answer.

So, if people are talking about lifting their ability to answer more difficult questions, then yes. That's what studying is all about.

Don't forget, by the way, that you have to get better at doing the questions you already know how to do in order to be able to answer more difficult questions. You can't afford careless mistakes on ones you can do, because then you may not get yourself to a higher level to be offered harder questions. And you also have to learn to be more efficient at the ones you can already do, because the harder they get, the more time they take on average - so you really have to be able to fly through the ones that are below your level (or the level you're hoping to get to).

Stacy,

That is very much what I was thinking myself - that the difficulty of the question is really what matters and not the hit rate. However, before I took my first practice exam I focused mainly on hard questions, but on the exam I didn't get to the hard questions because I was missing too many medium questions. After that exam, I realized that it's important to nail the basics down so you can quickly move to the difficult questions (even if you don't get the difficult ones right) since you can never reach the hard problems if you cannot correctly answer the medium ones. What you are saying falls exactly in line with my own thinking.

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