Last weekend the second MGMAT CAT gave me the same result as before – 700 (Q44; V41). Analysing my performance in quantitative, over 75% of the wrong answers were avoidable. There’s only a handful of tough problems that I really didn’t know how to solve and those are entirely combinatorics.
The tricky part is not looking at the timer too often, as it breaks the concentration. A couple of experiments revealed that I take more time to answer the first 1 or 2 questions, then my brain warms up and I spend less time on the next questions, even though they are more difficult. I make mistakes when the timer makes me nervous and I rush through a question. Another important lesson: on hard questions the guess rate is very close to 20% – i.e., there is no such thing as an educated guess. It seems the answer choices are carefully selected to take care of that.
Verbal looks pretty good so far, however I’ve been reading some disturbing posts about the difficulty of verbal on the real test compared to GMATPrep. The error log says that my weak spot is reading comprehension. So I tried three science passages from the OG, medium difficulty, and completely destroyed them. The average time was about one minute per question including the time it took to read the passages. This sucks; the Verbal guide has to have some tougher material.
On a side note, this is the first week I got the answer right to a ‘Workbook Wednesday’ question, for approx. 2 minutes. There is hope yet.
Tags: gmat
