hi fred at magoosh here today we're going to go over a specific strategy of what to do when
you encounter a score plateau and i emphasize specific strategy because there's a lot of
you can do it kind of material out there and that's very valuable but what we're covering
today is something more on the analytical side of how to if you're stuck in the 500s range
to maximize your chances of pushing into the 600s or in the 600s into the 700s or perhaps just
incremental gains when you feel as if you've been despite how long you've studied with the exam and
how many questions you do stuck in the same kind of band the same range and the short answer the tl
dw if you will the too long didn't watch is to find out in what area is your weakest and in what
area and what areas are tested the most during the exam and where they intersect now that's kind of a
statement well of course i'm going to focus on the things that have the highest return on investment
but we as tutors have found out in magoosh and actually data shows that people actually
tend to under allocate time to those very subjects usually from not knowing what they are and second
from just needing to get a little bit better at that one subject that's already fairly good
so with that being said this video will really focus on that particular strategy and how to use
it let's jump in now this resource is fascinating it breaks down into allocations the chances that
you're going to see certain types of questions on the gmat itself and it's tempting for any
test preparation institution to tell you to study everything because they're all important
and that is true to an extent because this these are baselines you could happen to get a few
more geometry questions than is average but realistically speaking there are going to be
certain subjects that are a little more important than others and that you would be wise to allocate
a bit more time onto them than to others and by the way you can find this kind of resource in
many places online this comes from magoosh but you can also find this and other
on other websites they can disagree a little bit on percentages in particular i've seen probability
jump up or down two or three percentage points on the on their hierarchies this
is still valuable because they tend to agree with one another
on the order on the rank of where they appear on the exam relative to others
i want you to concentrate on the top line and bottom line here really think to yourself have
i been spending time in those subjects or have i been spending too much time on those subjects
conversely it's really worth it to make sure that you know integer properties and arithmetic
and two-dimensional geometry but far less so functions and coordinate geometry
you should know it but if there's a particular weakness in one of them focus on that and so
going back to that venn diagram we're going to write in or you're going to write in those
subjects from top to bottom and you can also do this by finding something like
this for verbal as well now let's go to the other side of the circle
now on the other side of the venn diagram we're going to put your relative weaknesses please i
encourage you to run as much off of data on this side as you can and not off of memory
it turns out that we're quite manipulated by loss aversion which is to say that we remember the
things that stung the most ah that one particular question that was just so difficult on the exam
and you might find that's a greater weakness than it actually is only because you couldn't answer
the 700 level version of it but you could the 500. meanwhile you're missing most 600 level versions
of another type of question but it flies under the radar because the pain is low so what's my point
you're going to need an error log now there are multiple ideas and i'll go through just
a couple of them your own personal log if you've already done this that's great
i hope you didn't over engineer it you're not going to need pivot tables and charts and monte
carlo simulations anything like that you're just going to need to know two different things
what was the question and what was it testing if you don't have that that's okay
you also have practice tests so if you've been taking the official practice tests
the official guide practice test you have a lot of data and as a as an aside by the way
many institutions the magooshes and manhattans of the world they create practice tests and they're
quite good in that they test subjects as close to the exam as they can truly the official tests are
because they've been made by the actual test makers just to cut above just a reminder to people
who are studying after that you can actually use the error logs from test prep websites
so whether you're using magoosh or another provider they actually will allow you to
look at error logs on there and that can be a valuable resource and finally gmat club
and you might have noticed i brushed i i went past a practice test pretty quickly there there's a way
to combine these two things and so i'm going to actually show you how to do that next this is
if you don't have a personal log from which you can already get this data or a test prep website
so this is for you if you don't already have those things let's jump in there
now if you study the gmat for a while it's likely that you've run into gmat
club in some capacity if you haven't that's fine gmat club is a community-led resource
so it's a little bit more like a reddit let's say where there's some excellent
content and there's some sub-par content but the real reason why it's valuable
is that on the official practice tests there is little to no explanation in the book there's
there's a small explanation and online there's no explanation so you regularly find yourself having
to google the question in order to find how other people solved it which leads you to gmat club
now a very neat feature that most people don't utilize with gmat club is their error log
if you have an account and they're free you can actually go to answer the question
and it appears in your error log so if you're logged in you click a b c d or e it will appear
in your error log and give you a link to this error log which will appear like this and this
is quite neat because it will actually document for you not just when you got the question wrong
but or right actually documents both but what type of question it was to make this clearer
let's export to excel which you can see above and see what that looks like it'll look like
this and this is quite interesting now as a tutor i've taken multiple questions but you might see
if we go all the way to the last column and we can sort a through z to make it easier for us that
certain types of questions i got wrong more frequently than others your list will likely
be shorter and this will jump out a little more in this particular case my goodness assumption
questions i better work on that assumption is a kind of critical reasoning question
so while i might have thought those those weakness questions were just so annoying to me it turns out
i've got an issue with the assumption questions and i didn't even realize it so start to write in
what you see most frequently occurring verbal or quant in that right circle that error log circle
of the venn diagram all right so we've covered using quant as an example what are the most
commonly tested subjects and then second how to use data when you're looking at what you're
getting wrong as opposed to intuition which should be relied on only if you cannot get the data
so what next and i leave that to you why why do i not give a specific tip here because
it really depends on your study schedule i definitely recommend that you create this
and that you especially look at verbal and i'll tell you why many people will say i have
a sentence correction issue well that's fine but what kind of sentence correction issue
is it that you're getting diction questions wrong or is it that you are
getting parallelism or modifiers or some sort of grammatical issue that you weren't aware of before
that's going to be valuable data from which you can derive some sort of study plan but
what i do recommend at a minimum is that you create a plan to address these sooner rather
than later so perhaps something like you take five questions on each of these subjects a day
perhaps it's that you say before my next test i'm going to go back into material perhaps in
the official guide or on a provider like magoosh in those subjects whatever you do make a plan
and so the rest is up to you i hope this was valuable and it's quite general on purpose
because nobody studies quite like you do i hope that this helps good luck you can do it bye you