It definitely feels that way, right? GMAC certainly has its imperfections as an organization, but to be fair, the creators of the GMAT aren't *trying* to build a test that induces anxiety. It's an accidental consequence. I wish that test-makers were more sensitive to test anxiety, but they certainly aren't tormenting you on purpose. But you're 100% correct, Parth: for many (maybe most?) test-takers, anxiety is a much bigger problem than any lack of knowledge or skills. If you're interested in proactively tackling test anxiety, you might enjoy this playlist: kzfaq.info/sun/PLiaK8zyGGndn3zYXqBDWdBxCSSJjHaRT6. Thank you for taking the time to comment, and have fun studying!

Awesome -- so glad you found the video helpful!

Thank you so much for the kind words, Oshin! Glad to hear that you're enjoying the videos. Accuracy is definitely important on the GMAT. But the quirk of an adaptive test like the GMAT is that WHICH questions you miss is arguably more important than how many questions you miss. So I would think of it this way: after you do a GMAT practice test or a set of GMAT practice questions, wait a day or two, then retry the questions you missed completely from scratch. Do your best to "wash your brains", and completely forget what you did before. And then here's the key metric: as you redo the questions you miss, how often do you think "OMG, how the (bleep) did I miss THAT one?!?"? Whenever that happens, you're missing questions that are easy for you -- and you have no business missing those, because those are the errors that can torpedo your score on an adaptive test. Sure, it's also great to get better at the harder questions, but job #1 on the GMAT is to make sure that you eliminate "unforced" errors -- so judge your performance primarily by your ability to execute well on questions that you're perfectly capable of answering correctly. Mike gets into this issue a little bit in this video, specifically geared toward optimizing your use of official GMAT quant questions: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gp6BrJiAyt6qkZs.html. I hope that helps a bit!

@@GMATNinjaTutoring Definitely, thanks so much! :D

I did my errors again, and I got alot of them right the second time :D But what I do about the ones I got wrong again? The fear of getting them wrong again is preventing me from redoing the Verbal questions I got wrong earlier :(

Thank you, Tif!

Thank you for the kind words, Bhavika! Glad that you enjoyed the video. I would think of it this way: no quant question is really worth 3+ minutes, since spending that much time on a question makes it very, very likely that you'll be forced to rush through other questions, and then you'll probably miss easy questions... and then the wheels can come off on an adaptive test like the GMAT. It's totally fine to spend a bit more than two minutes though: you'll spend an AVERAGE of two minutes per question on quant, so it's not a problem if some questions take a bit longer. You just don't want to chase anything that's likely to take you 3+ minutes. I hope that helps a bit!

To be fair, based on the limited data we have so far, the correlation between number of errors and score might be a bit stronger on the focus edition. But that doesn't change the upshot, and the "tl;dr" section of the video still applies! You still have to avoid getting stubborn on the questions that give you trouble. Otherwise, you'll find yourself rushing and making careless mistakes on questions that are easier for you, or you'll struggle to finish the sections on time.

Thanks for the comment! Don't feel like you have to make up your mind just "from the first look of a question" - in fact, you should be giving EVERY question an honest effort and only bailing once you realize it isn't going anywhere. Anytime you do a set with individual question timers (e.g. the online question banks on mba.com), take a look at your CR times... if there are even just a few that took much longer than 2-3 minutes, then you'll want to figure out what went wrong on those (e.g. maybe you were down to 2 answers and spent lots of time trying to figure out which one to pick). Tough thing to address without working with you, but hopefully that helps a little!

On an adaptive test like the GMAT, your score isn't based primarily on how many questions you miss. Instead, your score is determined by WHICH questions you get right and wrong. So if, for example, you miss easy questions, you'll just see more easy questions, and your score will never be all that high. In this case, the second student missed relatively easy questions, and never saw many hard ones. As a result, the score was on the low side, despite missing fewer questions. The first student missed more questions, but because they were tougher questions, the score was higher. I hope that helps a bit!

@@GMATNinjaTutoring It is really very astonishing to understand this and I think luck plays a major role in GMAT. I could see in the video that the second guy did not make too many consecutive mistakes and the first 4 questions were also correct like the first guy. So couldn't understand how did the second guy not get harder questions at the points of faults unlike the first one! This apparently luck element sucks the test taking experience.

@@kushchokhani7243 Not luck but your performance will determine it. Please refer GMAT Ninja's reply to the previous comment.