Introduction
Which section should I start my GMAT test with? When should I take my break? These are two of the most common questions that we get from our students. Having worked with 1000+ students, we strongly believe that starting with your strongest section (risk minimization strategy) not only gives you the best chance to succeed but also leverages the section and the question adaptiveness aspect of the GMAT Focus Edition (GFE) to your advantage.
Why does the section order matter?
There are 6 possible section orders on the GMAT Focus Edition. There are two fundamental strategies we can use while choosing section order:
Maximize comfort: I need to be 100% while attempting verbal, while I can do quite well in Quant even when I am 90%. People who feel that way, generally choose the “Maximize comfort” strategy and start their attempt with Verbal, which in many instances also seems to be the score maximization strategy. These students execute the order as V>Q>DI or V > DI> Q.
Minimize Risk: In addition to being question adaptive, the GMAT is also section adaptive. This means that if you do well on section 1, you start section 2 at a higher difficulty level. Likewise, if you do poorly on section 1, you start section 2 at a lower difficulty level.
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Since the question adaptive nature of the GMAT penalizes you much more if you make a mistake on easy questions, students who follow the risk minimization strategy start with their strongest section first and then move on to their weaker sections. This means that a student whose strengths are in the order Q>V> DI will first start with Quant, then move on to Verbal, and finally DI.
At e-GMAT, we have been recommending the “Minimize Risk” Strategy since March.
What are the advantages of Minimize Risk Strategy?
There are two advantages of this strategy:
1) Minimizes Risk:
Your GMAT Score is driven by your sectional sum of scores, your strongest section is (generally) the biggest contributor to your GMAT score. By starting with your strongest section, you ensure that your strongest section (the starting point) is not impacted by the poor performance in the weaker section. Second, you start your weaker section at a slightly higher level, which gives you some leeway if you are prone to making early mistakes.
2) Potentially gives you an additional break:
GMAT Focus only allows one break. However, if you get done with your strongest section ahead of time (which many people are likely to do), you potentially get an additional 5 minutes to close your eyes and meditate. This ensures that you go to the next section refreshed.
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What does this strategy guard against?
This strategy guards against you (the student) making careless mistakes on easy questions early on in the test – the kind of questions that the GMAT penalizes you the most on. Note, this strategy is not a substitute for ability. You must have the ability to score high for this strategy to work. This just ensures that you give the test a fair chance to evaluate and estimate that ability.
Why do we recommend this strategy?
Early on, in the test, we noticed that some of our students, despite achieving high accuracy, achieved very low scores. For example, we had a student who made 6 mistakes on the Verbal section and yet scored V75 (19th percentile). We had others who scored low on Quant despite achieving high accuracy.
This was puzzling because many of three reasons:
- Many of these students had much higher abilities based on our internal metrics.
- These students had demonstrated high accuracy in the section in question on the test.
So, only one explanation remained – the question picker on the test primarily served easy and medium questions to these students, and did not increase the difficulty level high enough, despite a string of correct answers.
Two other things were common for these students – they scored below 80 in their preceding sections, and they made a mistake in the first five questions. What was also puzzling was that we had another group of students who also made mistakes in their early questions and still received higher scores.
Post this, we had a conversation with our POC at the GMAC to confirm that the test is indeed section adaptive, and this adaptiveness is limited to the early part of the test. Post that, the question adaptive nature is the primary driver.
Putting two and two together, we decided that a better strategy for students aiming for 645+ is to ensure that the test does not serve you easy questions. We started implementing this strategy from March onwards and have achieved much more consistent results. We are at a level where there is excellent consistency between our internal predictions and the actual performance on the test. (Note, we still get the occasional outliner, but those are attributed more to personal factors)
Note, this strategy has not been endorsed by the GMAC. This is purely based on our research and the inferences that we have drawn based on the same.
Strategy Recap:
To minimize your risk of making mistakes on the easy questions, start with your strongest section. Ideally, choose your section order in the order of your strengths.
This strategy requires practice!
Before concluding the article, it’s important to emphasize a few key points:
- This strategy is not a substitute for building ability. It merely ensures that you are able to express your ability on the test.
- Executing this strategy requires that you implement this on at least three mocks.
- This strategy (and every other strategy) will fail if you mark questions for review early on the test because the test decides the difficulty level of every successive question based on whether you mark the preceding questions correctly, even if you mark those questions for review.
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