BREAKING: Target Test Prep releases Brand New 2026 On Demand GMAT prep course

Redeem

Study progress: Cat results

This topic has expert replies
Post new topic Post Reply
Previous Topic Next Topic
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2010 10:43 am
Thanked: 2 times

Study progress: Cat results

by 5abi » Tue Jan 18, 2011 8:03 am
Hello,

I have been studying since Oct 1st, with about 2weeks off sporadically inbetween. It seems as if my test results have not increased one bit, even though my accuracy on the OG guides is well above 95%. I only get 1 question wrong for every 25 questions from all three OG guides. So i'm kinda worried as to whats going on.

My Cat results have been

MGMAT 1-4 between 600-620
Knewton: 650
Princeton review: 600
Kaplan tests from CD rom Gmat premier 2009 (done online) 620
Gmatprep1 attemp1 1: 560
Gmatprep1 attempt 2: 650 time inbetween to attemps was about 2months

I really would love to get into the 650-670 range by febuary 14th.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Top
Source: — GMAT Strategy |
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 88
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2010 12:05 am
Thanked: 67 times
Followed by:15 members

by eternal_optimist » Tue Jan 18, 2011 8:54 am
I think that a lot of us are bitten by the "I got 80% accuracy in OG" bug (and if you go through my debrief, you'll see that I was no exception). I think where most of us tend to go wrong is that we get smug with our accuracy rate in the Official Guide. What we don't take into account is the fact that most of the OG questions are in the 450-650 difficulty level, so you'll most likely get most of the questions correct. What we don't realize is that the how wrong is such an approach to doing OG questions. Official Guides shouldn't be used a parameter to test your accuracy,rather it should be used to build up your concepts . I think that we can learn a lot from each question in the official guide, probably much more than what we think we can. Your practice test scores are an indication of the fact that your concepts are still not strong enough. You really need to work on them because the questions on the actual GMAT ,as most people report, are tougher than those what you see on the GMATPREP.
What was is the usual break up of your scores like ? Which area are you facing difficulty in ?And what are you doing to tackle it ?
Top
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2010 10:43 am
Thanked: 2 times

by 5abi » Tue Jan 18, 2011 9:02 am
Hey,

Thank you for the response.

My break up on the mgmats are ranging Q42-44 V24-34 same can be said for kap

My knewton attempt was Q44 V37
Gmat prep1 attempt 2 was Q45 V37

I really want to write the exam in two weeks, but I don't understand how else to study? I have practiced practiced practiced by butt off.

Again thank you, I will be viewing your debrief
Top
User avatar
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 59
Joined: Wed Aug 11, 2010 3:26 pm
Thanked: 8 times
GMAT Score:750

by Random Wok » Tue Jan 18, 2011 1:30 pm
Do you time yourself when you do the OG problems? That could be a variation from the actual GMAT Test.

I found that my OG percentage was pretty high as well, but on the test, scoring high is about how consistently you can answer the hard questions.
Top
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2010 10:43 am
Thanked: 2 times

by 5abi » Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:07 pm
i do time myself and very seldom run into a timing issue. Could the issue just be I am not training for a Manhattan program? different formatting of questions.

I will be re-writing gmatprep 1 today, its been 1.5 months since last write so it should be close to fresh...will report back
Top
User avatar
GMAT Instructor
Posts: 132
Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2011 12:26 pm
Location: New York City
Thanked: 68 times
Followed by:37 members
GMAT Score:780

by Adam@Knewton » Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:06 pm
eternal_optimist wrote:I think that a lot of us are bitten by the "I got 80% accuracy in OG" bug (and if you go through my debrief, you'll see that I was no exception). I think where most of us tend to go wrong is that we get smug with our accuracy rate in the Official Guide. What we don't take into account is the fact that most of the OG questions are in the 450-650 difficulty level, so you'll most likely get most of the questions correct. What we don't realize is that the how wrong is such an approach to doing OG questions. Official Guides shouldn't be used a parameter to test your accuracy,rather it should be used to build up your concepts . I think that we can learn a lot from each question in the official guide, probably much more than what we think we can. Your practice test scores are an indication of the fact that your concepts are still not strong enough. You really need to work on them because the questions on the actual GMAT ,as most people report, are tougher than those what you see on the GMATPREP.
What was is the usual break up of your scores like ? Which area are you facing difficulty in ?And what are you doing to tackle it ?
I want to echo this as a major issue many of us face. An additional difficulty, especially with Verbal questions, is that many of us can answer most or all of the easy-to-medium-difficulty Verbal questions with "common sense" and not using any methodology at all. Then you get your first 5 Verbal questions right on the CAT and, all of a sudden, you're not going to see any like that ever again. You're only seeing hard questions and you have no method to attack them; you're just using your common sense and the hard questions specifically defy common sense. So, yes, eternal optimist is exaclty right. Ignore what percentage you are getting right, and focus instsead on HOW you got it right, and what you have learned that you can use on a similar problem next time. If you learn to attack all the problems, even the ones you could have gotten right anyway with intuition, with a solid concept-based approach, you will see good results not only in general practice, but on CATs and on the actual GMAT.
Prep Smarter, Score Higher
www.knewton.com
Top
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2010 10:43 am
Thanked: 2 times

by 5abi » Wed Jan 19, 2011 10:14 am
AdamKnewton wrote:
eternal_optimist wrote:I think that a lot of us are bitten by the "I got 80% accuracy in OG" bug (and if you go through my debrief, you'll see that I was no exception). I think where most of us tend to go wrong is that we get smug with our accuracy rate in the Official Guide. What we don't take into account is the fact that most of the OG questions are in the 450-650 difficulty level, so you'll most likely get most of the questions correct. What we don't realize is that the how wrong is such an approach to doing OG questions. Official Guides shouldn't be used a parameter to test your accuracy,rather it should be used to build up your concepts . I think that we can learn a lot from each question in the official guide, probably much more than what we think we can. Your practice test scores are an indication of the fact that your concepts are still not strong enough. You really need to work on them because the questions on the actual GMAT ,as most people report, are tougher than those what you see on the GMATPREP.
What was is the usual break up of your scores like ? Which area are you facing difficulty in ?And what are you doing to tackle it ?
I want to echo this as a major issue many of us face. An additional difficulty, especially with Verbal questions, is that many of us can answer most or all of the easy-to-medium-difficulty Verbal questions with "common sense" and not using any methodology at all. Then you get your first 5 Verbal questions right on the CAT and, all of a sudden, you're not going to see any like that ever again. You're only seeing hard questions and you have no method to attack them; you're just using your common sense and the hard questions specifically defy common sense. So, yes, eternal optimist is exaclty right. Ignore what percentage you are getting right, and focus instsead on HOW you got it right, and what you have learned that you can use on a similar problem next time. If you learn to attack all the problems, even the ones you could have gotten right anyway with intuition, with a solid concept-based approach, you will see good results not only in general practice, but on CATs and on the actual GMAT.
Thing is I do use the elimnate stragedy when I do my verbal questions, I look for the errors as described in MGMAT SC and PS CR books to discriminate between the incorrect answers and the correct one.

Could the issue be, the fact that I am using old Kaplan and 800score.com exams?? I scored 650 on the knewton?

Or Should I drop doing questions and focus on reviewing math and verbal again? I am confused.

Thank you,
Top
User avatar
GMAT Instructor
Posts: 132
Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2011 12:26 pm
Location: New York City
Thanked: 68 times
Followed by:37 members
GMAT Score:780

by Adam@Knewton » Wed Jan 19, 2011 11:22 am
First of all, it shouldn't matter what source you're prepping from. Yes, some are "better" than others, but if you're doing practice questions the right way, they don't need to be the "best" questions in order to give you a significant benefit. More on this "right way" below.

One of the errors a lot of students make -- and this is, for obvious reasons, especially prevalent among non-native English speakers -- is to basically memorize the wording of the practice questions in whatever book or course they're using. Remember that the GMAC problems are copyrighted, so none of us -- Knewton, MGMAT, Kaplan, Veritas, BTG, etc. -- can use the same style of wording. Furthermore, even the officially-released GMAT questions do not cover every style of wording and are all slightly-out-of-date questions, meaning they've reworded new questions that none of us, myself included, have ever seen. GMAT skill is NOT about memorizing the exact words and phrases that tip you off to right or wrong answers, and most elimination techniques are built upon these kinds of tricks (incidentally, these do work much better for the SAT and LSAT, which are updated less frequently than the GMAT or GRE). Instead, to do well on the GMAT, the real skill you need is the skill to, given a totally random out-of-nowhere problem that you've never seen before, interpret what they're "really" asking and translate it into a problem you HAVE seen before. So, unless you're doing this translation regularly and honing this skill, then even getting 100% of the MGMAT or OG or Knewton or whatever questions correct will not necessarily give you a great score on the GMAT.

The right way to practice for the GMAT is to remember that it's practice. Think of all the questions you'll do in anticipation of the test. Hundreds, maybe thousands of loose practice problems in Math and Verbal; at least a half-dozen practice essays; and 5-10 CATs, at least, for most of us, so that's another few hundred questions. Ask yourself, how many of these questions, the thousands you'll do before test day, actually affect your final score? Answer: zero. The only questions that matter are the 80 (2 essays, 37 math, 41 verbal) that you see on test day. Everything else is just practice.
As you're doing questions, you never should really care whether you got it right or wrong. If you get every single practice question wrong and then do great on the real 80, that's a great GMAT score and you're happy. If you get every single practice question right and then do terribly on the real 80, that's a terrible GMAT score and you're upset. Admittedly, those two scenarios are unlikely, but the point is that ONLY the real 80 matter.

What this means is that, on every practice question, don't ask yourself whether you got it wrong or not. Ask yourself the following when you start every question:

1) What kind of question is this?
2) What is the correct approach?

And the following after you're reviewing it -- whether you got it right or wrong ask the same questions:

3) Did I identify the question type correctly?
4) Did I quickly decide on the right approach?
5) What should I do next time I see this question?

That final question is by far the most important. If you get a question right, it matters HOW you got it right. If you got it right "the wrong way," then that is worthless to you because it won't be repeatable on a differently-worded question on the real test. If you got it right "the right way," you want to figure out exactly what is worth taking away from it and repeating. If you got it wrong, you probably need to figure out what you should have done differently and try that next time. If you got it wrong because of some silly error but can answer all 5 questions confidently, then that's great! Who cares that you got it wrong? Business schools will never know!

So, keep practicing practice questions, regardless the source, but stop thinking about how many you get right: think about your methodology, about the repeatability of your approaches, and about answering those 5 questions. This will set you on the path towards being able to figure out any crazy question the GMAT throws at you on test day, whether you've seen that exact thing before or not, and will keep you focused on the only thing that matters: the real 80.
Prep Smarter, Score Higher
www.knewton.com
Top
Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2010 10:43 am
Thanked: 2 times

by 5abi » Wed Jan 19, 2011 1:18 pm
AdamKnewton wrote:First of all, it shouldn't matter what source you're prepping from. Yes, some are "better" than others, but if you're doing practice questions the right way, they don't need to be the "best" questions in order to give you a significant benefit. More on this "right way" below.

One of the errors a lot of students make -- and this is, for obvious reasons, especially prevalent among non-native English speakers -- is to basically memorize the wording of the practice questions in whatever book or course they're using. Remember that the GMAC problems are copyrighted, so none of us -- Knewton, MGMAT, Kaplan, Veritas, BTG, etc. -- can use the same style of wording. Furthermore, even the officially-released GMAT questions do not cover every style of wording and are all slightly-out-of-date questions, meaning they've reworded new questions that none of us, myself included, have ever seen. GMAT skill is NOT about memorizing the exact words and phrases that tip you off to right or wrong answers, and most elimination techniques are built upon these kinds of tricks (incidentally, these do work much better for the SAT and LSAT, which are updated less frequently than the GMAT or GRE). Instead, to do well on the GMAT, the real skill you need is the skill to, given a totally random out-of-nowhere problem that you've never seen before, interpret what they're "really" asking and translate it into a problem you HAVE seen before. So, unless you're doing this translation regularly and honing this skill, then even getting 100% of the MGMAT or OG or Knewton or whatever questions correct will not necessarily give you a great score on the GMAT.

The right way to practice for the GMAT is to remember that it's practice. Think of all the questions you'll do in anticipation of the test. Hundreds, maybe thousands of loose practice problems in Math and Verbal; at least a half-dozen practice essays; and 5-10 CATs, at least, for most of us, so that's another few hundred questions. Ask yourself, how many of these questions, the thousands you'll do before test day, actually affect your final score? Answer: zero. The only questions that matter are the 80 (2 essays, 37 math, 41 verbal) that you see on test day. Everything else is just practice.
As you're doing questions, you never should really care whether you got it right or wrong. If you get every single practice question wrong and then do great on the real 80, that's a great GMAT score and you're happy. If you get every single practice question right and then do terribly on the real 80, that's a terrible GMAT score and you're upset. Admittedly, those two scenarios are unlikely, but the point is that ONLY the real 80 matter.

What this means is that, on every practice question, don't ask yourself whether you got it wrong or not. Ask yourself the following when you start every question:

1) What kind of question is this?
2) What is the correct approach?

And the following after you're reviewing it -- whether you got it right or wrong ask the same questions:

3) Did I identify the question type correctly?
4) Did I quickly decide on the right approach?
5) What should I do next time I see this question?

That final question is by far the most important. If you get a question right, it matters HOW you got it right. If you got it right "the wrong way," then that is worthless to you because it won't be repeatable on a differently-worded question on the real test. If you got it right "the right way," you want to figure out exactly what is worth taking away from it and repeating. If you got it wrong, you probably need to figure out what you should have done differently and try that next time. If you got it wrong because of some silly error but can answer all 5 questions confidently, then that's great! Who cares that you got it wrong? Business schools will never know!

So, keep practicing practice questions, regardless the source, but stop thinking about how many you get right: think about your methodology, about the repeatability of your approaches, and about answering those 5 questions. This will set you on the path towards being able to figure out any crazy question the GMAT throws at you on test day, whether you've seen that exact thing before or not, and will keep you focused on the only thing that matters: the real 80.
Thanks for the advice adam, I will definatly heed it, starting today after work! Its just a tough pill to swollow as a native-english speaker.

So in summary:

Slow down
Study methadology on correct and incorrect answers? And find a way to improve?

Do you think the OG questions are not enough to improve a persons score? How can I bump up my math score from 40-41 to 44-55?

Thansk in advance1
Top
User avatar
GMAT Instructor
Posts: 132
Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2011 12:26 pm
Location: New York City
Thanked: 68 times
Followed by:37 members
GMAT Score:780

by Adam@Knewton » Wed Jan 19, 2011 2:18 pm
I think the OG questions are enough in terms of quantity, but if you've already gone through most of them, you'll need more. In addition, it really is essential to practice real adaptive CATs, which is why people are always hunting for practice tests. Once you master the concepts, you need to practice trying to stick to the same methods in the context of the test, which is always changing topics and wording on you and challenging you to use the correct methodology every time, even on weird questions.
Prep Smarter, Score Higher
www.knewton.com
Top
Post new topic Post Reply
• Page 1 of 1