Analyzing Your GRE Practice Tests, Part 3

by Stacey Koprince Oct 30, 2013

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Welcome to part 3 of the article series on analyzing your GRE practice tests. As we discussed in the first and second parts of this series, we’re basing the discussion on the metrics that are given in Manhattan Prep tests, but you can extrapolate to other tests that give you similar performance data. If you haven’t already read those, do so before you continue with this third part.

In the first part, we discussed how to assess the data provided in the “question list”—the list that shows the questions you received and how you performed on each one. In the second part, we began analyzing the data in our Assessment Reports. We’re going to continue with that task today.

Last time, we covered the first of five Assessment Reports that you can generate in the testing system. Today, we’ll cover the final four reports.

Quantitative by Question Format and Difficulty

The second report shows your Quant performance by Question Format and Difficulty. You will already have some ideas about your performance from your initial analysis; now, you’re seeing whether this data confirms what you already suspect and whether you can pick up any additional nuance from this more detailed report.

In general, performance drops as questions get harder, so you would expect to have the highest accuracy on the Easier problems, dropping to your lowest accuracy on the Devilish problems. Check to see whether this trend holds or whether the data is surprising.

Our pretend student generally followed this expected trend for Quant and QC questions: as the questions got harder, her average performance dropped. (We should really give her a name. Let’s call her… how about Cathy?) On the other hand, Cathy missed a couple of easier DI questions even though she answered harder DI questions correctly. Hmm! Maybe she made some careless mistakes on something she did know how to do, or maybe the questions tested something that she didn’t know but that she could learn without too much trouble. She’ll need to dig into the individual questions to find out, but it certainly looks like there’s a good opportunity here for her to pick up some points.

Do you see the one data point that really jumps out here? Cathy spent 8.5 minutes on a single DI question! Except for that, her DI timing was right on target. She needs to make sure she’s got a mechanism in place to cut herself off so that she NEVER takes anywhere near that much time on a single question again!

Other than that, this data tells us that what we already hypothesized earlier is likely on target.

(Note: there is also a “medium-low” difficulty category, but Cathy happened not to get any math questions in that group.)

Verbal by Question Format and Difficulty

Now do the same thing for Verbal! (Note: some people prefer to do all of the Quant analysis and then do all of the Verbal analysis; feel free to do the analysis in whatever order makes the most sense to you.)

The third report is identical to the second, except it shows your Verbal performance instead of Quant.

As expected, Cathy’s performance generally drops as the questions get harder. There is one exception though: she answered 75% of devilish Sentence Equivalence questions correctly but only 33% of the medium-high questions. She was also working WAY too quickly—she spent less than 30 seconds per medium-high question, on average! She’ll need to check the individual questions to make sure, but she may have made careless mistakes due to working too quickly. She needs to slow down a bit!

Alternatively, perhaps she knew she didn’t know some vocab words. She needs to make flashcards for them right now and start studying!

Note: the timing averages for Reading Comprehension vary a great deal because the first question for each long passage includes the time to read the passage itself. For Reading Comp, you may need to dive back into the problem list to look at each problem individually in order to get a true picture of what happened.

As with the Quant, this data reinforces what we hypothesized when looking at the first report.

Quantitative by Content Area & Topic

The fourth report shows your Quant performance by the specific content area covered. The report contains 5 sub-reports, one for each Quant content area, corresponding to the Manhattan Prep GRE Quant Strategy Guides (Algebra, Fractions Decimals & Percents, Geometry, Number Properties, and Word Problems). I’ll show you just one of these (Fractions, Decimals, & Percents) for our fictional student, Cathy; all five sub-reports work in the same way.  To see the others, you would click on the underlined Text at the top of the page (Algebra, Geometry, etc.).

Take a crack at it yourself first. What do you think this data tells you?

The initial report indicated that Cathy generally performs well on these topics but sometimes takes too much time. When we dig into the details, we can see that there’s quite a performance split depending on topic area.

She’s fast with Fractions and with Digits & Decimals. In fact, maybe she’s too fast and her speed cost her the three incorrect questions in this area. She should check the three problems to be sure.

See how the word Fractions is underlined in the report? It’s actually a link. Click on it and another window will pop up with the three problems that fall into this category. Cathy can go and review them immediately!

What else? Cathy’s too slow with FDP Connections problems (these problems combine aspects of Fractions, Decimals, and Percents). She answered 5 out of 6 correctly, but some were slow enough that her overall average for that group was almost 3 minutes. She’s going to need to figure out how to do the work a bit more efficiently. (As before, she can click on the FDP Connections link to view those problems immediately.)

Finally, she took more than 3 minutes to answer one of the Percents problems incorrectly. If she’s going to get it wrong anyway, she wants to get it wrong faster next time. She’ll need to examine the problem to figure out what clues should signal to her next time that this problem is just too hard and she should let go much faster.

I need to give you one major caveat here. You’ll notice that a lot of these categories contain only 1 or 2 questions. A “0% right” label, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re terrible at this topic. For example, perhaps the 1 or 2 questions were harder questions. For this reason, you might also run the assessment reports using your last two or three exams so that the fourth and fifth reports contain more questions.

At this stage, your goal is really to dive into the problems and figure out why things played out they way that they did. If you discover that you answered something incorrectly and quickly because you knew that you didn’t know how to do it, that’s a great reason to get something wrong fast. In that case, you did exactly what you should have done.

Verbal by Type & Topic

The fifth report shows your Verbal performance by question type. The report covers only Reading Comprehension questions because only RC has different question types. The data for the other two question types, Sentence Completion and Text Equivalence, is the same data you saw in the first report, the Assessment Summary.

Here’s Cathy’s report:

What do you think? Remember that the average timing here may or may not be indicative of a problem, because the first question of a long passage includes the time to read the passage.

Cathy’s good at RC in general. Relatively speaking, her lowest area is Strengthen/Weaken—but she still answered 50% of the problems correctly. This category typically reflects short passage questions, so Cathy’s moving much faster than she should on these. Perhaps her lower relative performance is due to careless mistakes caused by speed. She’ll need to examine the individual questions to see.

Join us for the fourth and final part of this series, where we’ll summarize all of this information so that you can start to tackle your weaknesses!

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