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What to do if I am not a math guy?

Problem Solving — algebra and arithmetic (GMAT Focus Edition)
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by arora007 » Tue Jan 11, 2011 11:03 am
You need to choose some good resources in math and practice!practice!practice!

Work on basics and shortcuts, and develop good habits. keep a tab on the time you take in each question type (like the timing reported in MGMAT tests) you will figure out what kind of questions take you more time... practice basics of those questions...

I would suggest try the GMATFix - "OG Companion 12th edition" its the most comprehensive book i have seen for math. It guides initially questions from the OG. Solve yourself, and then compare your steps with the book, this will typically build math fundamentals from the basics and also provides shortcuts, and then later on advanced questions Outside the OG are provided. The Exhaustive material I think would be sufficient for improving your scores...
One more resource I shall strongly mention is the BTG practice questions, they too give you good amount of practice, if you are only looking for that!!
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by Tani » Tue Jan 11, 2011 2:45 pm
A good prep course such as Kaplan will ensure that you learn the basic material needed to perform on the GMAT math section and will teach you shortcuts and skills that will greatly improve your speed. Practice will be key. You cannot improve your score simply by listening to a teacher explain the test and the strategies. You need to practice until the strategies become automatic. Standardized tests, by definition, test the same concepts (not the same problems) over and over. If you practice assiduously you will have seen virtually everything the test is likely to throw at you by test day. Simply knowing how to start and moving quickly into a problem will be enormously important in building your speed.
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by Adam@Knewton » Tue Jan 11, 2011 2:57 pm
I agree that a good prep course will help, and that practice is the key. But I want to assure you that you don't have to be a "math guy" to excel on the GMAT Quantitative Reasoning section. I have had many students who were "math guys" (or gals) and who struggled because they wanted to do every problem with longhand algebra and couldn't think logically/critically about the test. Almost all of the GMAT Quant questions are first and foremost reasoning questions, almost like puzzles. The more you learn to uncrack the code of what they're "really" asking, the better success you'll see, regardless of your math skill.

In addition, most of the prep courses provide you with multiple methods of solving problems, some of which are less math-heavy than others. While many students balk at the idea of plugging in numbers or using the answer choices or similar non-math methods, they have been proven effective for decades on all standardized tests. Learn them and use them on test day and you won't have to be a "math guy" -- you can become a "business guy" :)
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by Tani » Tue Jan 11, 2011 3:17 pm
I agree the "knowing what they are asking" is crucial. More so than your school teachers did, the test is looking to see whether you can read and understand the questions. Every problem is checking to see whether you have command of one or more concepts. If you can figure out what they are checking up on, it will guide your attack on the problem, letting you get more correct answers faster.
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by Delayed_flight » Wed Jan 12, 2011 6:55 am
Thank you very much for feedback. Well let me then put my question another way - I'm not predisposed to think logically, that is it takes me some time to digest the necessary info to find a logical solution to it. Can this also be practised or is my brain just not into logical thinking?
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by Adam@Knewton » Wed Jan 12, 2011 3:15 pm
Thank you very much for feedback. Well let me then put my question another way - I'm not predisposed to think logically, that is it takes me some time to digest the necessary info to find a logical solution to it. Can this also be practised or is my brain just not into logical thinking?
Yes, it can be learned and practiced. However, you're going to have to let go of "your way" of doing things. A lot of students have difficulty with this, especially in the Verbal section, where many people can get a high percentage of the low- and medium-difficulty questions right just by "common sense" but falter on the harder questions. There really are a few proven, correct ways to do the Quant and Verbal sections alike, and the more you stick to these methods -- which you will learn from any major test-prep curriculum -- the better you'll do.
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by rjank » Wed Jan 12, 2011 4:15 pm
I'm having exactly the same problem you are. I can get problems right often enough, but it usually takes me too long to figure out the logic of the question and determine how to go about getting the answer. On practice CATs, this means I run out of time in the math section and gimp my quant score by leaving questions unanswered/randomly guessing on them and not finishing the section.

When I'm doing questions in the OG, I notice that sometimes I'll knock out a question quickly, I answer it correctly, and it feels "easy". The very next one I'll get mired down on and it feels so much more difficult to me. Since these questions are directly next to each other the OG is telling me that they are the same difficulty. I'd suggest that when you take too long figuring out what to do on a question, you note the concept/area that is being tested or anything else notable about it. Keep track of what concepts regularly trip you up, and focus on those while still keeping the areas you're stronger in up to par. Look into what the proven strategies are to succeed on questions testing the area you have issues with. Then practice, practice until you can get that time where it needs to be.

Or at least that's the plan I've come up with.
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by aleph777 » Fri Jan 14, 2011 11:02 am
Sadly, I think the only "trick" is more and more practice. I'm not a "math guy," either. I stopped taking math in high school with pre-calc, and that was the last time I looked at a math problem until now.

The good thing about the GMAT is that there's very little they actually do test you on. It's number properties/theory, basic geometry and algebra, and it touches on statistics, too (something I never even saw while in high school).

The only thing they end up doing is rephrasing concepts and questions a hundred different ways, but usually you see a clue in the question or the answer that will give you an idea of what to do. I started studying last July. I went at math hard for a month, and could still barely answer a 500-600 level questions. I stopped because work got hectic at the beginning of August, and didn't think about it again until this December. I still could barely do a 500-600 level question, but I think the concepts somehow marinated over the course of a few months, and as I learned them this second time, I started to not only 'get' them, but more importantly I started seeing the same ideas come up again and again, and so I started to recognize problem types and therefore problem strategies.

Just as an example, if you saw x^2 -5x + 6.... in a problem, you should recognize that it's a quadratic and that the GMAT is most likely trying to disguise the fact that you need to factor it into (x-2)(x+3), either for a solution or in order to cancel out some other phrase in the problem....

I find that recognizing the type of problem is just as important as knowing the math, so see what happens if you just start doing problems for the sake of asking 'what kind of problem is this'? quadratic? Number properties? A word problem with fractions or percentages? And once you recognize that, ask yourself, well what are the tools you need for this sort of problem?

Hope that helps at all! I think those of us who are math-deficient are in the minority on this forum, but I really think it's just about trying to think about the problems a hundred different ways until you find a way that clicks.

Good luck!
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