Yesterday I found myself on the sorry end of an appalling display in quant. Not entirely sure what happened - i'm no maths genius, but I was scoring solidly in the mid-40s in the practice tests, which, when coupled with a normally very decent display in verbal would have been enough to bag a solid score.
But it didn't happen like that.
Question 1 - I had absolutely no idea how to answer. Panic, calm down, guess, move on. Question 2. Likewise. Rack brains for a while, realise it's going nowhere, guess, move on.
Problem is, as soon as my score started to go down, the exam started asking me all these questions that it assumed I knew about statistics, standard deviation, and all other bits and pieces that I had NEVER come across in any of my prep material (Kaplan, OG Quant, MGMAT).
As soon as I started getting these easy questions wrong, it was curtains. Where were my opportunities to display my fearsome grasp of geometry? Where was my chance to calculate the new concentration of acid / time it takes for three people to paint 90 houses / average time it takes a train to travel to Chicago? Just didn't happen. I came up against a whole range of questions I'd never seen anything like, and found myself completely incapable of answering many of them.
So, where to go from here? I know that my quant score does not reflect what I can do, but I'm in the bizarre position of being able to do most of the really hard questions - but being stumped by the ones that I should be able to do without even thinking.
It's clear that I need to go right back to the beginning and plug all the holes in my quant knowledge - but I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. How do I start? Help!!
But it didn't happen like that.
Question 1 - I had absolutely no idea how to answer. Panic, calm down, guess, move on. Question 2. Likewise. Rack brains for a while, realise it's going nowhere, guess, move on.
Problem is, as soon as my score started to go down, the exam started asking me all these questions that it assumed I knew about statistics, standard deviation, and all other bits and pieces that I had NEVER come across in any of my prep material (Kaplan, OG Quant, MGMAT).
As soon as I started getting these easy questions wrong, it was curtains. Where were my opportunities to display my fearsome grasp of geometry? Where was my chance to calculate the new concentration of acid / time it takes for three people to paint 90 houses / average time it takes a train to travel to Chicago? Just didn't happen. I came up against a whole range of questions I'd never seen anything like, and found myself completely incapable of answering many of them.
So, where to go from here? I know that my quant score does not reflect what I can do, but I'm in the bizarre position of being able to do most of the really hard questions - but being stumped by the ones that I should be able to do without even thinking.
It's clear that I need to go right back to the beginning and plug all the holes in my quant knowledge - but I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. How do I start? Help!!
