I just wanted to highlight a couple of other things - I agree with David's excellent points above:
- first, what hurts you most on the GMAT is getting *easy* questions wrong. It really doesn't matter when in the test those questions appear. It is true that higher level test takers are more likely to see easy questions early on, but that is not always true; there are several factors used to select your questions, and your ability estimate is only one of those factors. Even if you're a Q50 test taker, you might see an easy question late in your test which counts, and if you get that question wrong (or need to guess at it), you won't likely get a Q50 score. Question selection is a lot less predictable than many prep books claim.
- re: "I had a hard time with problem #3 for some reason and panicked". I can't stress enough how important it is to learn from your experience with this question. On an adaptive test, unless you're a Q51 test taker, you are going to find *a lot* of questions very challenging on test day. Many of my students who have had Q50 scores have found several of their very early questions extremely difficult on the real test - even the first question can be very hard (I'm nearly certain that it's a myth that the first question is always 'medium level'). If you're a Q49 or Q50 level test taker, it's very important to be prepared for the fact that you'll see some very challenging questions, and you won't get everything right. In fact, you'll probably get between 1/4 and 1/3 of your questions wrong. So you should never panic if you can't answer something; if you're well prepared and are good at math, then if you can't see how to answer a question, it's almost certainly a top level question, and it won't hurt you much to get it wrong. If you let those wrong answers affect your performance later in the test, you won't perform at your level, and won't get the score you expect.
- as you saw on Question 3 on your test, many GMAT questions are much harder than they look. That particular question is not easy at all, even though, at first glance, it might appear to be quite basic. Some of the hardest GMAT questions I've seen appear almost trivially simple at a first reading, but contain some trick or subtlety that makes them deceptively difficult.
- re "After like 4 minutes i guessed and moved on" - this is something you should not normally be doing, unless you are absolutely certain that pacing is not an issue for you. Not only are you likely getting this question wrong by guessing, but by investing 4 minutes, you're likely to be forced to give up on one additional question later in the test, and that additional question might be easy, and thus could hurt you a lot. That's a big sacrifice to make. Since getting hard questions wrong barely hurts you, you should be willing to move on from questions when you can't see a path to an answer within a minute or a minute and a half. Save your time for when you know it will be useful.
- It's definitely true that you should spend more than 2 minutes on a question if you are sure that you will get to an answer. We discussed this issue in a previous thread, and using imprecise assumptions, I arrived at the conclusion that a right answer is normally worth between 2.5 and 3 minutes of time. So if you're sure to get the right answer by spending 3 minutes on a question, that probably is not a bad idea. More than that, and the wrong answers you're likely to get later because you need to rush might be more damaging than the right answer you get now.
- As for getting early questions right, it's "sort of true" that early questions are more important than later ones, for higher level test takers, but that shouldn't affect your approach to the test much at all. You might check your work a bit more carefully on early questions you know how to answer, but that's about it. This is all only the case because early questions are somewhat more likely to be easy than later ones. But if you spend so much time early that you need to guess quite often later, you're making a bad trade most of the time. And if you see hard questions early, they aren't going to be more important than any later easier questions. So in general you should spend more time on early questions if you'll get right answers by doing so, but give up quickly on early questions if you can't see how to answer them in a reasonable amount of time.
- And one last comment: it's a mistake to draw any strong conclusions from one or two GMATPrep tests. The particular statistical properties of the GMATPrep question bank will have too great an influence on your conclusions - for example, if the typical difficulty level of early questions on GMATPrep is quite low, you might conclude after experimenting with the test that early questions are crucially important on the GMAT in general. That's not a valid conclusion (and it's the type of logical issue many CR questions test; you cannot always generalize about a larger set from a subset). The questions you see on the real GMAT might have very different difficulty levels from the ones on GMATPrep, and the conclusions you draw from GMATPrep might not always be applicable to the actual test.
For online GMAT math tutoring, or to buy my higher-level Quant books and problem sets, contact me at ianstewartgmat at gmail.com
ianstewartgmat.com
