4 Steps to Analyze Your GMAT Practice Tests (Part 3)
Are you ready to get even more geeky about your GMAT practice tests? ☺️
In the first two installments of this series, we talked about:
Part 1: Global executive reasoning and timing review
Part 2: Per-question timing review
If you haven’t already, start with part 1 of this series and work your way back here.
Let’s continue with a deeper dive into the broad strengths and weaknesses revealed by your GMAT practice tests.
Run Your Reports
Note: this article series is based on the metrics that are given in Manhattan Prep GMAT practice tests, but you can extrapolate to other GMAT practice tests that give you similar performance data.
In the Manhattan Prep system, navigate to your practice exam area and click on the link “Generate Assessment Reports.” The first time, run the report based solely on the most recent test that you just did; later, we’ll aggregate data from your last two or three tests.
The Assessment Summary
The first report produced is the Assessment Summary; this report provides the percentages correct for the five main Quant and Verbal question types, as well as average timing and difficulty levels. It also gives a summary by overall Quant topic area. Here’s an example; see whether you can spot any problem areas. (You may need to zoom in. That’s a lot of data!)
Most people will immediately say “Oh, this student is much better at DS than PS.” Why? “Because the percentage correct is higher for DS.”
Actually, that may not be an accurate takeaway for this particular set of results. It’s crucial to compare three data points at once: the percentage correct, the time spent, and the difficulty levels.
It’s true that the DS percentage correct is significantly higher. But look at that timing: the student is spending a lot longer on incorrect DS as well. (Almost a minute longer, on average, than correct DS!) Where does that extra time come from? Incorrect PS is averaging only about 1.5 minutes, so she’s rushing on those.
Finally, check out those difficulty levels; she’s actually answering much harder PS problems correctly! What’s concerning here is that the average difficulty for correct vs. incorrect PS is almost the same—and that she’s rushing on incorrect PS.
I’d tell this student to start looking for careless errors—is that rushing costing her points on PS? And if she is able to answer harder PS correctly, why is the DS difficulty languishing down at a 510 for the correct problems, and why is she spending so much longer on incorrect ones? She may have an issue with the DS process or strategies, or she may be second-guessing herself on DS (or both!). I’d review the overall process and major strategies such as rephrasing and testing cases.
Plus, she needs to learn to cut herself off on some of the harder DS problems (that she’s getting wrong anyway!). That average time of 2:39 for incorrect DS needs to come down. She’ll need to investigate how to know that she should cut herself off on any particular problem. For example, if she’s spent 1 minute but doesn’t really understand what the question is asking, that’s a great time to cut yourself off. Or if she’s spent 2 minutes trying some kind of plan/approach and she’s hitting a wall, that’s not when you want to keep going and try something else. That’s when you cut your losses and move on.
These kinds of results should catch your eye:
- Percentages correct below approximately 50%, especially when coupled with lower average difficulty levels and higher average times. Note that I don’t consider PS a “straight” weakness for the above student, even though the percentage correct is below 50%. She’ll need to investigate further, but the other two data points indicate that the real culprit may be rushing and making careless mistakes.
- Average timing that is 30 seconds (or more) higher or lower than the expected average. The above student is edging high on correct CR. Incorrect RC might be high—or it might be that she happened to miss a higher proportion of first questions for a passage (for which the time spent includes the initial reading time).
- A big discrepancy (more than 30 seconds) in average time for correct vs. incorrect questions of the same type; it’s normal to spend a little extra time on incorrect questions (because those are probably the harder ones!), but not a ton—that just means you’re being stubborn.
Take a look at the data for the Quant sub-topics listed at the bottom of the report. Notice any issues?
Geometry has a low percentage correct but is also super-fast. Maybe she just hasn’t studied geometry yet? (Indeed, I know that is true for this student. ☺) If you haven’t studied it yet, then ignore that data; it doesn’t matter right now.
Number Properties also has a low percentage correct but quite high time on the incorrect ones. The difficulty level for those is also by far the highest, so it makes sense that she’d have been tempted to spend extra time…but this is another example of where she needs to learn to cut herself off. She lost an average of 41 seconds on 4 problems, or 164 seconds total. That’s 2 minutes, 24 seconds—more than one entire problem’s worth! She could have used that time elsewhere.
Question Format & Difficulty on GMAT Practice Tests
The first Quant report and first Verbal report sort the questions by Question Format and Difficulty. Here’s an example of the Verbal report:
Spot anything?
The student has a very high percentage correct on CR, though she did have to spend some extra time to get there. Where did that time come from? Incorrect SC and some RC. (The latter is hard to see from the report because it doesn’t have a separate category for reading time. But 4 passages and 12 questions should typically add up to around 28 minutes and she spent just under 25 total on RC.)
It can be okay on Verbal to have one question type take longer than average if one or both of your others are faster than average…and if that speed is not costing you points. She’ll need to analyze to see whether she had any careless mistakes on SC or RC. I’d start that analysis with SC; RC still had a higher percentage correct, but SC was lower.
It would also be a good idea for her to spend some time reviewing the correct CRs to learn how she can streamline her process. If she can still get those problems right in, say, 2m10s on average rather than 2m28s, that’s a lot of time to spend elsewhere!
In the Question Format & Difficulty reports, look for:
- average timing that is 30 seconds (or more) higher or lower than the expected average, and whether that is happening on correct or incorrect questions, or both (and note that you may have to do some deeper investigating on RC, due to reading time)
- lower percentages correct on lower-level questions than on higher-level questions
As before, look at the data points across these categories together. You might be spending too much time on incorrect higher-level GMAT practice tests’ questions and not enough time on lower-level questions (that you then get wrong because you’re rushing).
This student had a lower percentage correct for RC 600-700 than RC 700-800. The number of questions is small for 600-700, so this may not mean much—but it’s something to keep an eye on.
In fact, this is her third practice test, so she can go “keep an eye on” that right now. Re-run the reports using the last two tests vs. just this one. How does the picture change?
Wow! The RC percentage correct is the same, but CR changed drastically. And SC bumped up a bit. What are the messages here?
First, she significantly improved the percentage correct on CR from test 2 to test 3—that’s good in general, although her average timing also increased. It’s possible that she really dove in and worked on CR between these two GMAT practice tests, and her efforts paid off in terms of accuracy, but she still has some more work to do as far as efficiency is concerned.
She is still missing 600-700 level RC more than 700-800 level, so she’ll likely want to dive into those questions to figure out why. Is she falling into some traps? Are there certain question types that she’s weaker at (and she happened to get those more at the 600-700 level on these two GMAT practice tests)?
One big concern is that the percentage correct for SC is trending down though the difficulty levels were about the same on both GMAT practice tests. She’ll want to examine why when she does her individual question review.
Speaking of that individual question review, join us next time, when we’ll dive into the final batch of reports: Content Area & Topic data for both Quant and Verbal.
Keep Reading: Part 4
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Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here.