Published Sep 30, 2003
After a solid week of practice, I’ve moved from getting the medium-level questions on my practice GMAT to getting hard questions. This is good, because the harder the questions you get (at least on the computer-adaptive test), the higher the score you’re eligible to get.
The practice has helped — it’s good to see the same kinds of questions over and over again, the idea of how to approach similar problems gets burnt into your head and approaching each challenge becomes easier. I’ve also memorized a few formulas, and each time I use a formula it becomes easier to remember.
The tricks that the Princeton Review teaches have also helped. On several occasions, I recognized when I gave an incomplete answer or made a silly mistake because the answers looked wrong in one of the several ways they taught.
I’m a little concerned, however; while I answered more questions right, I ran out of time at the end of my practice test. This was not a problem I had the first time I took a practice test. I need to learn to work more efficiently, since I think there were some times I spent too long on one problem. I also should probably practice guessing some, since I wasn’t able to guess effectively on the problems left when I knew I had run out of time.
Finally, 50% of the questions I got wrong I got wrong because I failed to convert units to get the right kind of unit for the answer. I’ve got to double-check that!