hi i'm erika one of the senior curriculum managers here at magoosh and a gmat expert and in today's
video i'm going to talk about everything you need to know for the gmat math section now if
you're new to your gmat study i really recommend checking out chris's video on gmat math 101 for
information on question types question concepts section timing all of that good stuff but in this
video i'm going to focus on three of the biggest misconceptions about the gmat quant section
that many test takers never get right so the first thing you need to know about gmat math
is that your quant section scoring is going to be totally different than your verbal section scoring
now both sections are scored out of 51 but that means entirely different things for each section
so a couple of examples a 47 is a 99th percentile in verbal but a 69th percentile in quant a 27 will
give you an average verbal score but you need a 40 for an average quant score moral of the story
you can't and shouldn't compare raw score between the two sections percentile is going to be a much
better indicator of success so rather than aiming for approximately the same raw quant and verbal
scores aim for similar percentile scores in the two sections the second thing you need to know
about the gmat math section is that missing fewer questions does not mean you're performing well now
i talk about this a little bit more in my video on how i got a 770 on the gmat but in a nutshell
on both sections the gmat is going to try to feed you questions that are at a difficulty level where
you're going to miss about half of those questions so if you're missing fewer than half what that
means is that you're actually missing questions that are below your level and as a result the
test is compensating by lowering your difficulty level until it's so easy that you're missing
fewer questions and getting more of them right so rather than that being an indicator that you're
going to score better it's actually an indicator that you're going to score worse because your
difficulty is dropping so the takeaway here is that accuracy or getting more questions right
isn't all it's cracked up to be it's more about the difficulty of the questions that you're
getting right and the difficulty of the questions you're getting wrong and the third thing you need
to know about gmat math is that difficulty is tied to question complexity not question concept so for
instance some of the hardest gmat questions out there are about arithmetic or integer
properties something seemingly simple while some of the easiest questions out there are tied to
probability permutations and combinations something seemingly really difficult
so we can learn a couple of things from this so first we can't blow off any concept that could
show up on gmat math just because we consider it difficult because it might not actually be and
missing a question on that subject may actually lower our difficulty level and thus lower our
score but perhaps more importantly second the game in gmat math is more going to be about handling
that complexity and thinking critically especially when it comes to recognizing and responding to
traps so prioritize this in your study and don't let your guard down even when it comes to easy
question concepts and those are three of the most important things you need to know about
the gmat math section now if you're interested in continuing your quant study today i recommend
checking out derek's video on five gmat quant tips you need to know let us know if this video helped
you by liking and subscribe for more videos from me and the other gmat experts at magoosh
and if you have suggestions for future videos leave those in the comments thanks for watching
and i'll talk to you soon so moral of the story moral of the scory what try to feed you questions
great take incredible