Hi I'm Melody with Magoosh, I'm a test prep instructor but I'm also a math teacher and
a mathematician. So I want to share with you some of my advice for how you can get the most success
out of your preparation for the quant section on the GMAT exam. Now most of us realistically
will have to do some prep work for the GMAT for a variety of reasons. One reason is that there
are maybe some topics covered in the quant section that you haven't covered in a math
class recently. Maybe there are topics that you learned back in high school, back in middle school,
and if those aren't front of mind if you haven't been using them you might have to review them.
We also might have some concepts that maybe we didn't learn the most strongly the first time
around. Maybe your teacher was unclear maybe you weren't in the most focused place at that
time and that's okay. We might need to relearn and review some of the basic math principles.
We also will probably need to adjust to different question types there are some different ways that
the GMAT might present concepts to you from what you have used in a math class before, especially
those data sufficiency questions. It's a different type of reasoning, a different type of approach
from what we may have done before. We also want to make sure that we are practicing our test taking
skill regarding the quant section. Things like the pace that you're working with from question to
question the different strategies that you use to identify a right answer maybe in a non-traditional
way as well as using the process of elimination in an effective and meaningful way and being able to
identify when it's time to guess and move on if we're not so sure about the answer to a question.
So let's say that we want to figure out how much work there is to do. I absolutely recommend
to everyone that early on in your studies you take a full length practice GMAT or at least a
full length practice quant section. This is going to give you a few different benefits.
One is that you're going to become familiar with the different question types that you're going to
see on the exam. You'll see that variety, that mix. Same thing for different concepts you'll begin to
have an idea for what kind of math things you're going to see on the exam you'll get a feel for
the timing, you might find out that you ran out of time with a bunch of questions left to go
or you might find out that being timed at all is something stressful for you. You'll
learn what those obstacles are so that you know what you need to work on and overcome.
You're also going to get an estimated score for that quant section. Don't pay too much attention to
the raw score itself but instead use that score to find out what your percentile ranking would
have been for that exam the best you can. That estimate is going to give you an idea of how far
you might be from the goal that you need to meet. It's possible you'll find out that you're right on
target to do all in the quant section already to meet your goals and if so that's great. Most of us
won't find that and that's perfectly okay. It's all right to do poorly on a starting diagnostic exam.
There are many benefits from it and you should not be discouraged at all if you find out that
you have some work to do. Let's talk about what that works going to look like. As I mentioned we
are going to need to review some of the content some of the actual mathematical information that
we might have learned. Now many people think that there are some advanced math concepts
tested on the GMAT and really most of what you're going to see is actually at a high school level.
So not advance in terms of how far into college you would be but perhaps what makes it advanced
is the way questions are framed so the actual math concepts you're going to need to learn are
at a high school level or a little bit below. Like I said it might be harder for you individually
if you haven't seen those things in a while and that's okay. So we want to review the highest most
frequently tested concepts, not all of mathematics. You want to be brushed up on basic arithmetic
operations with percents and fractions properties of integers and how to work with numbers
without the use of a calculator during the exam. So that might take a little bit of practice.
You need to have a good understanding of basic algebra manipulation, so how to solve equations, how to work
with inequalities, how to rewrite expressions. Skills like factoring or working with quadratics
systems of equations, rules relating to exponents, all of those things. You will need to know some
geometry, the different properties and the formulas that surround the most
common shapes including angle relationships and area and perimeter and really a lot of rules of
triangles are commonly tested on the exam. You will need to use some simple statistics things
like mean, median, and mode. Things that maybe we didn't even call statistics when we were
learning them in school. We're not going to need an advance understanding of college-level statistics
there are definitely more concepts than this that can be tested but I recommend focusing on the most
frequently tested concepts to build a really solid foundation for yourself and if you find you've
got them all under your belt and you can still improve your score some more by adding the more
rare concepts tested on the GMAT then great go ahead and add those,
but make that a later priority in your studies. Now once we've got those concepts in mind
the most important part of your preparation is going to come from realistic practice. So
you want to practice with high quality practice problems that come from the test makers themselves
or from reliable sources like the problems that you can see in Magoosh. At first you might want to
practice in an un-timed way let yourself have all the time you need to really work out a question
apply strategies find the correct answers the best you can and then as time goes by you should start
adding a timed element more and more. Little by little your pace on questions should naturally
improve as you become more comfortable but working with timing is very important
in order to complete the sections on the exam within the the time allotted on the clock.
Now all the practice in the world isn't going to do that much for you unless you learn
from that practice. So you need to review, review, review your practice if you're not doing this then
that is the biggest gap in your test prep, not just for quant but for everything that you're learning.
Whenever you practice a problem you want to be able to go back if you're just working on
individual problems do it then. If you're doing a full-length section or a full-length exam
time come back and review every problem if you got it right and you knew exactly what you were
doing that's great. If you got it right and it was an accident, you guessed, then you might need
to learn what was the gap in your understanding or what step did you not do right if you got it wrong.
Did you make a small calculation error? Were you missing some concept knowledge? Did you misread
or fall for a trap built into the question? Once you've got that information I recommend using an
error log to record the mistakes that you're making. It could be that you just need to learn
more about the topic, it could be that there are certain uh errors certain mistakes that you tend
to make personally more often. You can check out our m- our GMAT blog for a great example of an error
log with a template that you can download and use for yourself. Learn what patterns there are to the
wrong answers you're getting and that will be a very powerful tool in helping you to benefit from
all the practice that you do. Another point that I always make sure to tell my students is that there
are in fact many different ways to get a right answer on any math concept. A lot of times in
formal math classes our teachers don't like that. They might want you to learn only one specific way
but the reality in mathematics is that there are many many correct ways to find an answer.
So I suggest experimenting going about the test in a few different ways. You might learn
some strategies that you can substitute for the traditional or more formal way for example do I
want to solve this problem using an algebraic equation or what if I tested out what's in the
answer choices to see if those solve the problem there might be different strategies you can use.
There are different approaches and I encourage you to try them all.
Work out the same problem two or three different ways if you see different approaches and figure out which strategies are the most effective for you.
That really truly varies from person to person so we can't tell you what the best strategy is, we can provide you options and you have to test out what's
best for you. What's best for you is of course going to be giving you accurate correct answers as reliably
and as often as possible it's also going to feel more logical and more clear to you
than something that you personally would find a little bit more confusing. You're going to
want to look at which quest- which methods, which techniques, are helping you to find the answers
quickly as possible and with the lowest amount of stress. You want to look for which ones will
help you to avoid small calculation errors that could lead to wrong answers. The best method for
you is going to make you have the smoothest most successful experience on test day with a
high percentage of questions that you can work through comfortably and do your personal best.
Finally going back to that concept of learning from your mistakes, as you review your error log,
as you look at patterns of mistakes you're going to figure out some concepts that you need to
relearn or remember that might be different from another person. You're going to figure out what
mistakes you're most likely to make and you want to use that to personalize your studies to focus
on the areas that will fill in the gaps in your personal performance on the GMAT quant section. It's
a good idea to start with the lower difficulty areas where you personally have weaknesses in
your performance and build your way up to harder and harder concepts and question types as you go.
Finally know when to stop you should have a score goal in mind and be satisfied with stopping when
you've reached that. You hopefully will reach a level where you're performing consistently around
the score that you're going to need to reach on exam day and beyond that improvement might be
satisfying but isn't necessarily the best use of your time and your energy. Try to get to a point
where you can consistently sustain a score that you will be very happy with and then you will know
that you're getting close to ready to take the actual exam. So we've discussed a lot of different
concepts here and it's not necessarily that you want to do a bunch of different steps in order
but if you consider all these components you apply them to the way you study, what you study,
and the methods that you're using. Then those will work together to help you be prepared and
feel prepared and confident, ready for the quant exam on the GMAT. So go ahead get started in your
practice if you haven't yet apply these tips and I can't wait to see how well you do on the exam.