About a week ago I took the Kaplan diagnostic test online. I got 10 answers wrong out of 38, which didnt sound too good. This was my very first go at the GMAT. I found the Data Sufficiency portion particularly annoying since I have built a habit of solving problems. Sometimes I would consider the 2 statements together subconsciously, and most of the times I would try to solve the problem and waste valuable time.
But what I really have to work on is careless errors which I did a lot. Overall Kaplan just give you the result and doesnt give you much of a direction. The only thing you can do is see what you got wrong to attempt find weak areas.
I took the Official Guide (OG) diagnostic test a day ago after getting back to the habit of taking a test. I did a few problems, read some tips about Data Sufficiency since it I wasnt familiar with that type of exercise. Here how I did:
Problem Solving: above average
Data Sufficiency: excellent
Reading Comprehension: average
Critical Reasoning: above average
Sentence Correction: above average
Obviously for data sufficiency I did a few problems before to understand what it is all about otherwise I would have probably been in the average bucket. But roughly 15% of my errors were careless! How stupid, this reminds me I will not do what I did for college for 4 years: not sleeping and doing last minute study before an exam. Seriously though, I make mistakes so stupid I sometimes wonder if I have ADD.
Anyway, at least with the OG you easily get a sense of where you stand. For quant I should be able to correct my mistakes with a bit more practice to get familiar with algebra, ratio problems and similar problems. For the verbal part, I was actually surprised with my diagnostic. I thought not being an native english speaker would give me more problems. Sentence correction is definitely my #1 weakness, then critical reasoning. It turns out that I would have gotten all questions right for reading comprehension if I was just a bit more focused.
This week I’ll finish doing data sufficiency stuff, then move onto problem solving next week. I should also take the GMatPrep test #1.
Lessons learned for the day:
- Avoid careless mistakes is priority #1: read questions thoroughly, avoid mixing up answers keys…
- Need to review/pay more attention to the following type of problems: percents, proportions and ratios, property of numbers, working with algebraic expressions
Filed under: gmat
