Veritas Test & GMAT Prep 2; A bit more about timing; 4 Days to go !

I took the Veritas free test yesterday:

30/07 Veritas 1; 700 (Q51, V38)

And a GMAT Prep test this morning:

31/07 GMAT Prep 2; 770 (Q50, V45)

Veritas Test

The Quant section was really easy. Straightforward questions. I was able to breeze through with 30 minutes left on the clock!

The verbal section was easy except for the RCs. My score was markedly low due to an abysmal performace in RC. The answers were too subtle as they are in the CR section of MGMAT.

GMAT Prep

Disappointed with my Quant performance and quite happy with the Verbal. However, I was happy that the test gave me a chance to identify my still weak area in Quants - Inequalities.

The whole point of these tests is to give you a chance to identify weak areas and work on them. I see no point in giving a Veritas or a Kaplan test if the Quant section is too easy to yield any worthwhile analysis or the Verbal section is way too obscure. It doesn't matter if you get high or low scores in these tests as long as the questions are a true indicator of the level of difficulty on the actual GMAT and help in analysis.

Therefore, I have decided not to give any more practice tests of Kaplan, Veritas, Master GMAT and PR. I think they are just a wastage of time (which is valuable now). I will run the next 2-3 days based on the analysis of the test this morning. Work on the weak areas in quants and brush up on concepts in the verbal section.

Maybe, just maybe, I will take another test of either GMATPrep or MGMAT. I have taken 4 tests already on the GMATPrep and it may have run out of new questions for me, but instead of using it as a score indicator, I will use it for further analysis.

Btw, when you buy MGMAT books, they give you access to some online resources, 6 practice tests and also a question bank specific to the book purchase. I attempted a couple of theses question banks today and they are really good.

Timing

It is just not good enough that you are able to complete all questions in the quant section in the practice tests in time. You have to be so good that you are able to finish them with at least 5-10 minutes to spare. Why? You ask. Well, because during the practice tests each question is not do or die. Even if you are faced with a hard question, you attempt it reasonably well and then move on if not cracked; Or with medium level questions, you move on even if you are just 80% sure. However on the actual GMAT there is no way you will be able to move on at just 80%; You will tend to double check and triple check so you are 110% sure. This means you will take at least 10% extra time on each question. This roughly works out to 7.5 minutes (10% of 75 minutes) extra needed. Therefore, in the practice tests you must be able to finish 5-10 minutes to spare. This can only come with a lot of practice.

I attempted all the questions on the OG twice. The first time around the accuracy rate was 70-90% depending on the section and I used to take 1.5 - 3.0 minutes (Avg. 2.0 min) on each question. The second time around the accuracy improved to 80 - 95% but more importantly the range of my times were 0.5 - 2.5 minutes (Avg. 0.75 min) !