Missing questions due to lack of focus

[JoshuaS405]

Hi there,

I hope no one has posted something similar in this forum, at least I could not find it.

Sooo I have been studying for the GMAT for a while now, trying to get a reasonable score. I am not aiming for a 700+ Score, as - at least to me - it is just going to consume too many of my ressources. I am rather going for a score between 660 and 680.

However, while doing my CATS and working on Question banks, I noticed that I lose my focus very quickly. I miss a word here, miss part of a question there and all of a sudden, I am failing on four or five questions, that I could have gotten right! This is - as you can imagine - very frustrating! I scold myself every time, reviewing the questions but when I sit down the next time working through some OG questions or taking another CAT, I feel pressurised by the time and tend to lose my focus again. Does anyone have a trick or know a way how to solve this issue? That would be great!

Best regards,

-Joshua

[StaceyKoprince]

Great question! This is definitely an issue for a lot of people. And there are things you can do to help focus better.

First, as you noted, a big part of this has to do with the pressure of the test. You feel that you have to rush / work faster than you really feel comfortable working, and that pressure to go faster causes you to miss important details.

Mindfulness training can help. Read this:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-score/

The above article links to some free resources from UCLA. One of our teachers also recorded the below guided practice (15 minutes) for our students:
https://soundcloud.com/user-91744640/15 ... s-practice

There's also this program:
http://www.10percenthappier.com/mindful ... he-basics/
It has a free 1-week trial and is then paid, but I've had several students who have really liked it, so that's another option.

Second, mental fatigue is an issue. Mindfulness training can help to minimize fatigue. It's also important to pay attention to where / how you're choosing to spend mental energy during the test (or a practice session). The more mentally fatigued you are, the more stuff starts slipping.

You've been reading stuff already around time management and the importance of bailing / letting questions go at times, yes? Mental fatigue is an important part of that—basically, you have a finite amount of mental energy on any given day. Once it's gone, you're going to start making sloppy decisions (until you can go take a nap or sleep through the night...which you won't be doing between sections of the GMAT, obviously.)

So when you are working on time management / decision-making, part of getting better is reminding yourself that there is also a mental cost to choosing to spend time on some particular problem—and one very real potential cost is missing something (or thingS) later that would have been easier for you to get right. Factor that into your decision-making; it will help you to cut off hard stuff when you really should be cutting it off.

Third, process. Careless mistakes are not 100% completely random—the annoying truth is that we each tend to make the same *kinds* of careless mistakes when we're tired or stressed. Start logging them so that you can find your patterns, then take steps to figure out how you can improve your process to minimize the specific types of careless mistakes that you personally tend to make.

This could be bigger picture—eg, you mentioned missing words or details. One thing you could do is lift your finger up to the screen and literally point as you read—it's harder to miss words or details if you're pointing at each one. And maybe you don't need to do this on every problem but only on certain types. That could be an overall question type (eg, CR) or certain content areas (RC science detail) or certain question characteristics (3+ line quant story problem; full underline SC). This is where the log comes in, to help you identify your patterns.

This could also be much smaller. For instance, I tend to mix up 2*3 and 2+3. (Seriously. I must have learned them backwards when I was like 6 and now my brain sometimes still mixes them up!) So I know that, whenever I have to do either of those math operations, I write it down. I don't write when I'm doing 2*4 or 2+4, only with 2 and 3. Training myself to write it down is really a trigger to slow down for a second and think consciously because I know that's my particular pattern / careless error. But I don't make the error if I think about it for half a second.

There's more here on learning to minimize careless errors:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... -the-gmat/