The elusive 170 in quant

[siddarthkumar81991]

Hi Guys,

 

I am decent in Maths and have done well in college level math courses and also in school. I find that I make silly mistakes (and also a few conceptual errors) here and there, due to which my score is stuck in the 166-167 range in Quant.

 - How do I go about sharpening my skills to hit a 170/170 in quant ?

 - What books do you suggest I practice from ? (My GRE is around 10 days from now)

 

Also I feel that I may be wrong in my attempting strategy. I spend a lot of time pondering, checking and double-checking the answer that I get instead of moving to the next question. 

@the guys who scored a 170 - how did you guys approach questions ? 

- Did you employ a single pass approach ? or did you first attempt all questions, marking the difficult questions to the end ? Did you double check your answers by plugging in values at the end of the test ?

 

I am left with two strategies:

1) To go as fast as possible in a two pass approach, at the risk of doing silly mistakes. But I can catch such errors in my second pass. The problem comes when I am stuck with tough questions (especially in the 2nd quant sections), I may not have time to come back.

2) To spend time properly, double checking the answer in my first pass itself, before moving on to the next question. This may be disastrous again if I may encounter tougher questions in the last 15-20 question range.

 

Kindly help me out with your advice and suggestions on strategy.

[zapster]

It really depends on you own comfort level - my approach was to speed through all questions and then do a second quick pass of all to "check" etc. I would make a quick note of the specific questions I wanted to definitely do a second check on in case I was running out of time to do a full 2nd pass, but I could usually do the full second pass and still have a bit of time left.

 

Also, I think silly mistakes are not really dependent on how fast you go, but on being at a sub-optimal level of concentration - sometimes the need to speed up remains a conscious thought and actually hinders your concentration, thus resulting in silly mistakes (ala Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow - if you have read it, where he talks about conscious effort and need to apply self-control competing for cognitive resources). So try to go as fast as you can, but do not consciously worry about your pace - this will help you focus and eliminate silly mistakes. The only thing wrt time you should be wary about is in case you get stuck on a question for over XX (this depends on you personally) amount of time where you risk not completing the section because you are really stuck, in which case just move on and tackle this right at the end.

 

Best of Luck!

[33andathirdRPM]

There's nothing wrong with wanting the highest score possible. Still, I'm curious as to why you're determined to get a 170? A 166 or 167 shouldn't keep you out of any programs.