I wanted to ask if you have any tips of going from a Quant score of 160s to 165+. I took 3 official GRE Practice tests (1 of the online one, and both from the Official GRE Book), and my Quant score has been reliably between 159-160.
I reviewed every single mistake I made. I have a journal where I catalog all of the questions I’ve gotten wrong in Quant and analyze them, including redoing the problem and writing down why I made that mistake and my future plans to fix them. I also have done the practice questions in the 5lb Manhattan Prep book and have followed a similar process of mistake analysis myself.
Do you have any advice on how I can change my approach to break this barrier? Especially with analyzing mistakes, could you give me an example of your thought process on how you analyze it? It is quite frustrating and demotivating to hit this barrier, and I would love to hear how you have overcome it.
How are you performing in your timed practice sessions ? Because you may know all the concepts of a particular topics but remembering&applying them under timed constraint can be an issue. Also, do you skip questions or try to do any particular question-type first ?
What do you think is missing when going through Problem Sets? Also, how do you approach problems? Sometimes it is wiser to skip a question and come back to it later, instead of trying to figure it out right away. That is time consuming.
So looking back at my practice sessions/notes, I find that I make a lot of mistakes during my practice sessions, most of them “tragic mistakes (aka careless mistakes)” (between 60-80%). I find that when I redo them without a time constraint or walk away and come back in an hour after taking a break, I find that I am able to solve the problem.
I try to skip questions, but I’m not sure what is a good guideline between a question that I should skip vs put several more seconds in to solve it. And regarding a particular question type, I usually skip/avoid/save for last the questions that involve number property-type questions since I find that I have to spend a bit more time going through the logic.
Since applying these concepts under time constraints seems to be my issues, what would you recommend I do? Should I just continuously drill questions, but this time always put them under the timer? I remember watching the GregMAT videos on Quant, and for a while, I’ve always done it under a timer, but then I switched to no timer when I’m trying to practice since I don’t want the habit of making “tragic mistakes” to stick.
What do you mean by your first question? Sorry I’m a bit confused.
To answer your second question, I try a mix of strategies based on Greg’s Quant strategy videos (Backsolving, Plug in Numbers, Algebra, No-math, etc). I’m still getting a hang of mixing those strategies and finding when is the most appropriate time to use them, but I feel that I am mentally getting comfortable with mixing and matching strategies.
And yeah, I do agree with skipping the questions. However, how do you find a balance between which questions to skip? Also, how do you make sure that you have time to go back to them? I find that I usually might not have as much time as I thought to go back to them because as I go on through the section, I spend a bit more time on the questions.