GMAT Test Strategy: Quant Analysis

Good news! There’s a way to quickly improve your GMAT quant score. This study plan isn’t a magic weight-loss pill or a snake oil-esque trick; it actually works. Let’s face it, study time is finite. Not only are you busy, but you’re bound to experience burnout before long. To optimize your study time on the GMAT quant section, you need to have a study plan.

From a verbal standpoint, improving your score on reading comprehension and critical reasoning can be difficult because so much of your success is related to your reading skills. If you didn’t go to high school in the US and don’t read frequently in your leisure time, you’ll have to study for an exorbitant amount of time to improve them.

Sentence correction’s relatively short list of common errors makes vast improvement possible; the same goes for the GMAT quant section. However, you can study concepts and memorize patterns forever, but without a proper timing plan, you’ll be destined for disappointment. The key to mastering timing for quant lies in how it’s scored – it’s not how many questions you miss, but which ones.

Charles Bibilos, a GMAT tutor from Denver, CO, proved this point by comparing two of his students’ results. Student 1 answered 30 of 37 questions correctly on a practice test and Student 2 answered 21 correctly. Student 1’s efforts resulted in a 51. Student 2 scored 44. How’s that possible? Again: it’s not how many questions you miss, but which ones.

The key to answering the ‘right’ questions lies in your timing strategy. If you aren’t sure how to solve a problem after reading it carefully two times, make a guess and move on to the next question. Use the time you saved to make sure that you answer the questions you do know how to solve correctly.  

Since your GMAT quant score is based on the difficulty of the questions you faced, if you’re in a rush and miss ‘easy’ questions, your score will suffer dramatically. Conversely, the positive benefit for answering a ‘hard’ question correctly won’t be as impactful. The message is clear: don’t sacrifice your score’s foundation to attempt questions you’re unlikely to answer correctly anyway.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to know how to answer advanced combinatorics or three-set venn diagram problems to achieve your goal score. In all reality, you probably already know enough concepts to do so. All you need to make time for in your study plan is practicing this strategy. Then, on test day, you can let the GMAT’s scoring algorithm take care of the rest.