Published Oct 4, 2003

After a week and a half of pretty intensive review, I’ve managed to get my math scores up quite a bit. I’m making fewer mistakes and I’m more often choosing quick approaches to get problems solved in the least time possible.

But the weird thing is, I’m getting about the same number of easy, medium and hard problems wrong. It would seem most natural that I’d get more easy and medium-difficulty problems right than hard problems, but in fact that’s not true.
After a week and a half of pretty intensive review, I’ve managed to get my math scores up quite a bit. I’m making fewer mistakes and I’m more often choosing quick approaches to get problems solved in the least time possible.

There are a few errors that I seem to be making consistently:

  • I’m not working backwards often enough and plugging the answers the GMAT gives me into their questions
  • I’m writing out my equations in ways that don’t make answers obvious
  • I’m failing to simplify equations and fractions and therefore end up multiplying very large numbers, increasing the errors I can make and spending more time on a problem than I can afford

But I’ve taken care of some previous big problems:

  • I’m correctly converting units to get the answer in the kind of units desired
  • I’m making fewer silly errors
  • I’m guessing effectively

So things are getting better. Eleven more days to practice!