The Difference Between Scoring 605 And 705 On The GMAT®

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Transcript

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Welcome to the GMAT Strategy Podcast. You're here because you believe there's a better way to study for the GMAT, and so do we. We created the GMAT Strategy to maximize your results and minimize your efforts so you can get to the fun parts about business school and life as quickly as possible. My name is Isaac Poulia, and I've been teaching GMAT classes and tutoring privately for the GMAT for over a decade, and I've helped thousands of students get into the business schools of their choice. I'm excited to be a part of your MBA journey since we all at TGS believe that our world can benefit from the best possible business leaders that we can find. If this show is bringing you value, please share it with your friends and family who are studying so that together we can make this process as easy and as painless as it can possibly be. Let's go. Today, let's discuss the skill set that separates people who score at the 605 level from people who score at the 705 level. And we could have titled this episode a lot of different things. We could have titled it the difference between scoring in the 50th percentile versus the 99th percentile, or scoring the difference between scoring in the 80th percentile versus the 90th percentile. And the reason I bring that up is this is a really important question to answer, regardless of your score goal, because the differences that we're going to talk about today really apply across the score spectrum. So we could have just maybe titled this episode like How to Score High or How to Score Higher on the GNAT. And I think I think you'll find that to be very true as I talk about these differences. And my hope, my intention with this episode is to make this sound obvious. Like one, hopefully, once you've heard everything I have to say, you'll be like, okay, maybe I wouldn't have used those words, but like this makes sense to me. Because I think when what you need to accomplish makes sense, it's easier to put it into practice. And I'll talk about this more as we go. The things that you put into practice are the things that are most likely to actually get you results. Of course, it's great to have good mindset and good philosophy behind all of our techniques. But at the end of the day, if we can't take positive actions, it's unlikely we're going to get positive results. So we're going to try to hit both of those things today with the goal of helping you reach your goal score. That that's that's the ultimate intention. So even if your score goal isn't 705, understanding this conversation will help you whether you want a hundredth percentile score, a 90th percentile score, or whether you're just trying to get a 50th percentile score to meet the bar for wherever you want to go with this exam. So just diving right in, the number one thing that changes between score levels is pattern recognition. And you've probably heard that a lot if you've been on this journey for a while, like in blog posts or social media posts, or maybe even in paid programs that you've been in. So let's define what that is, break it down into its elements that you can use again with the goal of making it actionable. So I think at the base level, pattern recognition is how often you recognize something on a new problem that you've seen in practice, plus it's already associated with an effective approach. So I think we've got like four parts to the definition there. Let me break that down again. So it's how often how often you recognize something on a new problem. So step one is how often is this happening? Is it happening 30% of the time, or is it happening 90% of the time that you recognize something? And then are you recognizing it on new problems or in new exams? Or do you only have great pattern recognition on stuff you've already seen? Okay, so the first piece is how often am I recognizing it? Second piece is on actual problems I have not seen before. Third piece is I can associate that with something I've already seen in practice. And fourth piece is I have associated that thing I saw in practice with an effective approach. So there's there's four keys there. So starting with the first one, how often you recognize it. Probably the simplest answer to the difference between a 605 score and a 705 score is when you're scoring around the 605 level, which is 80th percentile give give or take, uh, as of this recording, that can shift over time. And you can find the most up-to-date data on MBA.com. If I'm getting a 605, I'm probably recognizing things on new problems that I've seen in practice, maybe 30 to 50% of the time. So one out of every three problems, maybe one and a half out of every three problems, I'm like, I think I've seen something like this before. And I think I might have an effective technique that I've practiced. Whereas at the 99th percentile, 705, I think is 98th as of today. But um if if we say like 99th percentile, 715, I mean, honestly, we're probably splitting hairs at that level. But if it's meaningful to you, then that's that's where we're at where we are today. At that ultra, ultra high where you're in the top percent of people on the exam, you're probably able to recognize things you've seen before on 70% or more new problems. So if we take the like 50% base case for 605, I'm recognizing stuff that often, half the time, maybe. And then I take the 70% base case for 99th percentile recognition, I'm 50% better at recognizing things at the 99th percentile. I'm recognizing things much more often. So that's the how often piece. That's a big, big separator. Because if it's only happening some of the time, you're gonna have these feelings during the exam of like, it felt unfamiliar. I felt like I wasn't prepared. It felt like everything was brand new to me on the practice test or on the official test. Uh, I just couldn't get into a rhythm. I didn't feel confident. I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing. Those are generally, not 100% of the time, but those are generally symptoms of you're not your pattern recognition is not kicking in often enough. So that's that first piece. How often I recognize something. Okay. On a new problem or new exam, I think is probably obvious. I try to avoid that, that word obvious. Um, and I I probably do a terrible job of that. So I apologize. Um it's it's just, I think, a an old, old pattern that I probably should should put more energy into remaking. Uh, just as an educator, I think saying things are obvious is just generally bad, bad practice. So I'll I'll work on that. But my guess is if there's anything that's obvious here, like you know what I mean by new problem, something you haven't seen before. I guess let's define it anyway. Like a brand new exam with all problems that you have never practiced before. Every problem is technically new. That's what I mean by new problem. And then that you've seen in practice. Again, probably pretty clear, but maybe worth clarifying a little bit more. So I might have seen a hundred overlapping sets problems in my practice sessions. And then when I go to take my official GMAT, I will highly likely see overlapping sets problems that have similar aspects to the ones I've seen in my practice, but not exactly the same. It's I think maybe once in the entire time that I've been helping people with this exam, have I heard someone say that on an official exam, they saw a question that was literally identical to a practice question they had done. And it was like the exact same numbers and everything. And I have my doubts about whether they were remembering that accurately, because uh GMAC, the people who write the GMAT, they put a ton of energy into making sure that doesn't happen. And that's part of the reason there's a waiting period between exams, because they need time to refresh the new question pool before you retake the test. Otherwise, if you could retake the take the test uh 10 times in in one day or something, or 10 times in 10 days, you'd probably start seeing actual questions you had seen on previous exams. And that would be that would destroy the integrity of the exam. So there's a lot of energy going into, okay, this is an overlapping sets question that fits the pattern of general GMAT overlapping sets questions, but maybe there's a new twist, or maybe there's a new set of numbers, or maybe it's a little bit more complicated than the ones you've seen in your practice. Maybe it's a little bit less complicated than the ones you've seen in your practice. So that then brings us to the last piece of the definition of pattern recognition, which is you've associated that practice question you've seen with an effective approach, meaning the strategy that you would apply on that past problem works well for you. And that's very personal. We've got a lot of content in past episodes about how to gauge that, how to build that, and I'll talk about that more later. But for now, let's just say you've done 100 overlapping sets questions and you've got maybe three strategies that apply to all 100s of those. You're like, I can basically boil down these 100 overlapping sets questions to these three concepts. Okay, so when you go to take the GMAT and you see an overlapping sets question, is there an 80% likelihood that one of those effective approaches you've seen in practice is going to apply on that new problem? Or is it a 20% likelihood that that effective approach is going to apply on that new problem? That brings us full circle to the beginning of the definition of pattern recognition, which is how often am I recognizing and associating a new problem with an effective approach for that new problem? And it just happens to be that the vehicle we use to build that recognition is past problems. So that's like the loop of pattern recognition. Definitely reach out to us if you have questions. There should be a link in the description of this content that says uh have questions, contact us. That should take you to the contact page on the site, and you should be able to get in touch with us uh hopefully relatively easily, but definitely give us feedback if that's annoying or hard. Okay, so let's dig a little deeper into that definition and again start to help you put it into practice. So I think the main key, and I was already touching on this as I was going deep on the definition. I think the main key there is can I associate a new problem with an effective approach? Because just recognizing the new problem and being like, I've seen something like this before is helpful. It's definitely helpful, but it's not enough. So I think it's good if you go in and you're like, okay, I've seen something like this in practice. You might not feel like the test is totally foreign. But it actually might make the experience and the result of taking the test even worse if you're like, I recognize part of the problem and I just can't bring myself to get the strategy to work quickly enough or across the finish line. I think that is really frustrating. So there's a little gap sometimes there that, or maybe a big gap in some cases, that that we need to close. And effective study time is going to close that gap. And I think just side note, this is this is where a lot of study plans that I've looked into over the years, I think miss the boat, where they're going over things, maybe even going over them repeatedly, but they they don't lock in the skill. They don't lock the strategy in such that when you see the new problem, the strategy is ready to deploy. And it's it's maybe we won't get to that place where it's quote unquote effortless. I think that's a good ideal to strive for. But we can get to the point where it's doable in a reasonable amount of time. And I would describe like when I hit my goal score way back in the day when I, when I was in your shoes, I think the feeling I had during the exam is like, this is really hard. I'm really struggling, but I I think like at least more than half the time I'm connecting the dots here. That was the feeling. And it wasn't the best feeling. And we've talked about that a lot in like our algorithm content and how the scoring algorithm is always making the test harder. And so we generally don't get the feeling that we get on typical tests where it's like, I've mastered this, I'm crushing this. A lot of times you won't have that feeling on the GMAT, especially if you're performing well. And there's a video on our website that goes into how the algorithm works and how that translates to feeling during the exam, if you want more depth on that. And that that should be linked in the description below as well. Uh, it's called how to how to reach your dream GMAT score in half the normal time. So again, um, going back to what might be missing for you if you're struggling to close that gap between 605 and 705 and you actually have invested in a program, part of the issue might be that program is helping you learn things, it's helping you go over things, but it may not have a systematic way that works for you to lock that skill in, to lock that pattern recognition in and improve that pattern recognition over time. Meaning, more often, every time you take a practice exam, more and more and more often you're recognizing things that you've seen. And you're able to associate those new problems with effective approaches based on your past problems. So naturally, I think that leads us to the question of well, if I'm in that situation, how do I fix it? And probably the best way that's gonna apply in the widest variety of cases. And since this is a public format and you and I are not working one-on-one together, the best thing I'm gonna be able to give you that is highly, highly, highly likely to work, but may not be perfect because you may have particular needs that I'm not aware of. But like the most highly likely thing I can give you, given the format here, is what we call our TGS two-part error log system. And I forget exactly what the name is, uh uh, but I'll validate that with the with the team later. Sorry, everybody. But that's that's close enough. That's close enough to what it is. So most error logs fail because they just become a wrong answer repository. Like they're kind of like a trash can where you just put all your questions you've gotten wrong, and it's kind of like unsettling to revisit it, just like taking out the trash is kind of stinky and it's like, oh, this is kind of unpleasant. Can I delegate this to somebody? Can I get out of this chore? I think that's how most error logs feel. And I think as a result of that, a lot of folks end up not revisiting their error log very much. It sort of is like a procrastination thing of like, oh, I'll get to that in the last week before my exam, or like I'll get to that later, or I'll get to that on the weekend, or something like that. And I do, I do want to be fair, like revisiting that some of the time, even if it's just weekly, is like definitely better than never revisiting it. But part of the reason you might not be developing pattern recognition as fast as you want to, or part of the reason you might be hitting a score plateau around 585 or 625, and you're unable to break through to that 685 or 705 level that you're shooting for, is maybe that error log is helping, but not helping enough, or not helping fast enough. So let's talk how to fix that, talk about how to fix that. So that's that's why you want the two-part error log. So the two-part error log, I actually recommend making two separate error logs. But some people are just so anchored in the single error log. And yeah, I I'm sympathetic to that. But here's why I like the two separate error logs. And if if you have this ability, I highly recommend it because it'll for sure speed up. Well, I can't say for sure in your case, like I was just talking about. I don't know you personally, but like 99.9% likelihood this is going to speed up your results. The first error log should be questions you knew how to do but got wrong. So, what I mean by you knew how to do it is you actually did recognize the correct strategy, whether that be from a past question or you just intuited it by looking at the question, you're like, cool, I definitely know how to do this. And then when you go back and review it, you're like, Yeah, I picked the right approach. I definitely knew, I definitely knew the right strategy to use here. But then you still got the question wrong. So there's a lot of reasons that can happen. Usually these are what people would call like execution errors or execution problems, like you misread the problem, like you picked the right strategy, but you solved for y and the question was asking for x, or you did two plus two equals five or something like that. We've talked a great deal about that in the past. I'm not going to go long on that specific thing. But the reason you want a different error log for that kind of question is that's a totally different type of mistake, and in general, requires a totally different approach to fixing it than a question you did not have a strategy on when you saw it. So I would recommend having a second error log for questions that you did not know how to do. You did not look at the question and associate it with the strategy, or you looked at the question and associated it with the wrong strategy, or your strategy is not good enough yet. Meaning like you picked a viable strategy, but it took like 10 minutes to get the question right. That's another way of saying like the strategy wasn't good enough, or you're not good enough at using the strategy. That's a totally different type of mistake than a question where I picked the exact right strategy and then just bumped, just did two plus two equals five. And I think when people put those in the same list, they have the right intention, like they genuinely believe they're gonna have different uh approaches to fixing those. Uh, but I just have found in practice that does not happen for whatever reason. I don't know. We I think we don't understand ourselves and we don't understand the human brain well enough to know why that happens. Or maybe if you are deep on that part of learning science and research, let me know if if if that is actually known. But to me, it's still quite mysterious. I haven't found the research on that yet. So yeah, get me hip if you know. But suffice to say that the outcome is what we care about here, irrespective of why that happens in the brain. And so as hopefully very practical business people, we would just want to find a good solution. And so that's that's a very simple, very useful, viable solution is just separate the the two lists. Now, going back to I'm sympathetic if you've been building this single list error log for your entire prep and you don't want to like try to use an AI or like go back and forth and prompt this thing to make it into two separate lists or like manually go through that. I'm sympathetic to that. Like that can be a pain. So what you can do is you can somehow distinguish between those two problems by tagging in the list. That is an option. Um again, still might be kind of a pain in the neck, but it's worth it. It's worth it if you are struggling to build your pattern recognition because it is going to speed it up. Let's just talk about the most practical, like I keep coming back to this word obvious. I shouldn't have even brought it up. Uh, but let's just say one of the most obvious reasons that works is if you have two different problems that require two different solutions and you're more easily able to implement the right solution for the right problem, meaning, okay, I missed this because of an execution error versus I missed this because I didn't know the strategy well enough. You're gonna get a lot faster results if you use the right tool for the right job. Like this is just hopefully that hopefully that requires no explanation. Uh I think I feel like I need a whole separate podcast just to describe the definitions of words I use. Um I I think I it's time for me to get out of the weeds on that. So I apologize, everybody. So staying, staying in the part of the lesson that's helpful for you. If you can separate those two types of questions, whether that be in one list or two lists, that's an extremely positive step in the right direction toward improving your pattern recognition and as a result, improving your score. Let's go a little bit further with that though, because I found that just separating them is not always enough to take people where they want to go. So let's talk about the first list, questions you knew how to do but got wrong. Let's talk about how to use that. What you want to do is you want to either personally analyze that or have a computer or AI analyze it for you and find what are what is the number one thing that keeps happening over and over again. And by the way, one one mistake I see people a lot uh make a lot with that list is they'll log it like for the first three times it happens, and then the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth time that same mistake happens, they're like, oh, I'll remember that. It's already in the list. This might sound harsh or extreme, but I highly recommend logging it every single time you make the mistake. And I can tell you this from experience, because this is what I did. The 15th time you log that mistake, it hits real different than the fifth time you log that mistake. And and my guess is you will be way more motivated motivated to fix it on the 15th time than the fifth time. Because I think somewhere around between the fifth and 10th time you've made a mistake, something transitions where the energy you have available to fix the mistake greatly increases. For myself, I'll just say like the first three or four times I made the mistake, it was easy for me to like forget about it and brush it under the rug and just be like, oh, whatever, I won't do that again. And then the 15th time I made the mistake, after 10 times or so of telling myself I wouldn't make the mistake and I'm clearly still making the mistake, I was like, okay, I need a different, I need, I need, I need to change this. This has got to change today. I need, I need to become like a different person here. And I'm not saying that because I want you to experience pain. I'm saying that because I want you to get results. And if all we need to get results is just logging the thing every time, even if that's painful, I think we can in 99.9% of cases for you say for sure that the return is is there on that investment, like high return on that cost. So that's how you want to use the first error log, the I knew how to do this error log is you want to log it every time those mistakes happen, no exceptions, and then you want to analyze which one comes up the most. Then what you're gonna do is you're gonna focus all future study sessions on fixing that mistake until you can't make that mistake anymore. And I've gone long on that in past episodes that we'll link for you below. The way to use The second error log well. Oh, sorry. And if it's if it's not obvious, then the way to uh progress with that is once once you can reliably tell yourself that you will never ever make that top mistake again, then you can move to the second most common mistake. And then once you reliably never make that mistake, then you can move to the third mistake, et cetera. Okay. The way to use the second part of the two-part error log, which is questions I didn't have a strategy for, is you want to resolve the questions in that list on a regular basis. Again, I've talked about this so, so, so, so much recently. So I don't want to talk about it too much, but I want to talk about it enough just in case you haven't gotten over the hump of of forcing yourself to do it. And let's face it, everybody, if the way to do well on this test was super intuitive, you'd already have the score. And I would have had the score in a few weeks or whatever of studying. Instead, it took me, I think, like 12 months end to end. I did everything wrong, by the way. That's that's why I'm telling you to do it the right way and not do it the way I did it. Uh so I'm hopefully going to save you a lot of time here. Uh, but it was super painful. I started doubting myself. I started doubting my own intelligence. I started doubting whether grad school was the right path for me, like all that stuff. And none of that was true. It's just I didn't have the right system. So here we are. So the resolving questions that you didn't have a good strategy for on a regular basis locks in that pattern recognition. But think about it this way: for the skills that you have gotten good and fast at in your life, have you gotten good and fast at those skills by doing new things every time? Or have you gotten good and fast at those skills by repeating the same thing lots and lots of times? There's probably a balance. There's probably to maybe 20% new stuff, maybe 80% familiar stuff. And that's just the way our brains work. If you look into the physical aspects of how the brain changes, it basically w when the cells in your brain fire about a specific topic, like a specific GMAT question, for example. Excuse me for one second, everybody. Such as a specific GMAT question, then those those circuits become stronger. And then there's there's a whole process that you can look into around that. But basically, uh the the cells in the brain associated with that thing fire faster, they fire more reliably, and they fire uh more efficiently if if memory serves. Uh, it's been a while since I've done the whole neuroscience thing. I should probably brush up on that. But that's the basic mechanics. I'm not way off there. And so that that rep that positive repetition is how you strengthen physically strengthen your brain on those topics. And that's how you build great pattern recognition. How do I associate effective approaches with new things? Quality repetition, not just new problems, a mix of new problems and old problems. So again, because you and I are not working one-on-one, I don't have all the details of your situation. I can't tell you exactly what the balance of new problems versus old problems is and where that review should go in your study time, and what specific topics out of that list you should prioritize. But you can start to do that analysis on yourself. And you're all very intelligent people on this path. I'm sure you can get pretty darn close to what you need. And I would encourage you to do that. But what's what's a good general recommendation just to get you started with this is if you have a resistance to it, just resolve one question from that list every time you study and just get some momentum. If you're open to it, but you're a little unsure about the value, I would say resolve three questions every time you study from the list. If you're confident in it and you've taken advice that I've given you and you've had positive success and you're like, Isaac, just give me the game. I know you know what you're doing. I've validated your advice with my results. Then I would say five to 10 questions every session is a good place to start. And then you can scale that up or down, depending on how much you think you need to build pattern recognition from what you've already seen, versus how much new material do you need to see? And you'll, if you're self-studying, you'll have to make that judgment call, but it's not rocket science. You look at your most recent practice test and you say, okay, how many of these questions were familiar things that I should have recognized? Okay, I probably need to do more resolving of questions I've already seen before, if there's a lot of those. How much of this is stuff I had no idea how to do because I'm just totally unfamiliar with the topic? Okay, well, that's where I need to go do some new stuff and like re-learn better strategies for probability because that's not that's not really a recognition problem there. That's like, I don't, I might recognize the problem. I don't even have a strategy to deploy. Okay, that's where you need more new stuff. So if you've if you've done a lot of studying and you feel like, okay, I've covered the content, I know the content, but it's still not connecting to the exam, then you probably need to resolve a lot of problems you've already seen. Again, I wish I could give you an exact number. We're working on some technology to hopefully roll that out. But yeah, I'm never going to deploy something to you that's not gonna help you. So so yeah, we're we're only gonna do that if it's really a win for everybody. And hopefully I've already made it clear when you need to do the new material. So that's how you use the the two-part error log. And if you start using that two-part error log in exactly the way that I just recommended it, again, 99.999% likelihood that that's going to greatly accelerate your pattern recognition and greatly accelerate your progress to that next 50, 100, 200 point gain that you want to make. Now, there might be some other things that need to change. So I'm just going to tie this off with a couple additional points, but I think these are not central to the topic of what separates 605 from 705. The first thing that might need to happen is you might just be missing tons of questions that you know how to do. And of course, we talked about how the two-part error log fixes that. But all the pattern recognition in the world is not going to help me if I then bumble the execution. And I just kind of want to circle back on that point because if I'm, if I'm consistently recognizing the right approach and I do have an effective strategy, but then I have, and then I cannot execute that strategy often enough to get the questions right, then that's like that's like building a boat that has a giant hole in it. It's like it doesn't matter how hard I'm rowing, like my boat's just gonna sink, or I'm gonna spend all my time bailing all the water out of the boat and not be able to get anywhere. Obviously, we don't want either of those things for GMAT prep. So if you're missing a lot of questions you know how to do, then you might have to put a ton of energy into that first part of the two-part error log. Like that might have to become your singular focus for like a month. And I have had clients where I'm like, look, you know all the stuff, you're fast with recognizing, but your scratch work is terrible. You're constantly missing questions you know how to do. Uh, 50% of the questions uh uh on this test you you got wrong because you knew how to do them, or 100% of the questions on this quant section you got wrong even though you knew how to do them. We need to, we need to build new habits. We need to go all in on building new habits. There is a time and a place for the nuclear option on that. Like you just have to go all in on that. But for most of you, it's probably going to be like a large, but not like 100% of the thing. But I just want to give you permission to go all in on that if that's the situation you're in. Sometimes that happens. The other thing that might need to change is just content knowledge. I was talking about this a second ago, meaning like you don't have enough effective approaches that you've learned already. And that's when you probably want to invest in a program or get a free study plan, if that's the situation you're in, and learn approaches to handle questions like, okay, what what are the what are the five things I need to know about inequalities? What are the what are the five things I need to know about number properties? What are the 10 things I need to know about rates questions? Oh, that's how you do a rates question? I wasn't doing it that way at all. So that part, I think, uh most people can self-diagnose pretty well there. I think most of you that I've talked to over the years, you know if you don't know the material. Uh so you can you can always get uh some some feedback. You can post on forums, you can you can um schedule time with it with an hourly tutor uh if you if you have that capability to just get some feedback if you're unsure whether you have enough content knowledge. And there's plenty of services available for that. But again, I'm I would say that your self-assessment there is probably largely accurate. So you might be missing just tons of questions you know how to do, might have to go all in on the first part of the two-part error log, or you might just not know enough stuff, in which case you might have to go all in on like learning stuff and get a program to help you do that. That's what most programs on the market do, by the way. They help you learn stuff. Uh, but the reason that that we've gone so hard, so to speak, on TGS over the years is like that that connection layer of like, wait, I went through this whole course, spent thousands of dollars, and my score didn't move at all, or my score went down. That's what happened to me back in the day. That we are trying to fix. That should not be happening. And who knows why those courses are not as effective as as they should be or as they claim to be. I guess we could speculate about that, but that's neither here nor there. If you have that problem, again, we just want to be practical, solution-oriented business people, fix the problem, get to the end result in an awesome ethical way, and then move on to the next awesome thing that we want to do. And yeah, if you want help with that, then head to the website and we've got tons of resources for you there to help you close that gap if that's the situation you're in. The last thing that may need to change is your time management strategy. Again, I've I've gone really long on this on um how to review practice exams episode, how to break through score plateau episode, um, how to build speed on GMAT focus questions episode, tons of episodes back in the feed if you want more depth on this. But interestingly, some time problems are related to like stress and anxiety in the mental game, which pattern recognition might not fix, by the way. Some time management issues are just uh haven't practiced enough, like you don't have enough reps under your belt. And that can be a tough reality to face. Like if you thought it was gonna take you two weeks and then it takes you two months or two years, that that's a difficult reality to face. But the more you can face reality, the more problems you can solve and probably the more success you're gonna have, certainly on this path. So those things might be tough realities to face, but the there's there's other solutions besides it, besides uh a better, better system for your study time that you might need to entertain there. For example, if you have severe test anxiety, I would definitely seek professional help there. It might be expensive in the short run, but like as a long-term investment, it's it's very difficult to argue with the numbers. Feel free to run your own analysis on that. And then with the uh just haven't done enough reps thing, again, like might just have to put in the hard yards. Most of us did, unless you're that super talented person. Uh, like I had a friend back in the day who studied for two weeks and got a 99.8 percentile score or something like that. And I had been studying for six months and I'd my score had gone down and that was a tough moment. Um, so so that's cool if you're that person, but most of us aren't. And so don't be afraid to put in the hard yards if you have to do a lot of reps to get familiar with it. But I don't want you to be in the position that a lot of people find themselves in, which is wait, I know this content. Let me just let me just do more reps, and that's going to be the difference between me getting a 605 and 705. That's probably not true. That's actually probably not true, and that's that's why we made this episode today for you. So, of course, some of time management will improve with better pattern recognition. But if you know that and you don't know how to build better pattern recognition, then that's a difficult place to be in. And here's the truth a lot of people have sold a lot of GMAT prep on the back of that like blog article or whatever, right? Like, oh, you got to build pattern recognition. By the way, buy my product now that will help you with pattern recognition. And look, I have nothing against people selling products as long as those products are good and as long as those products are delivered in an ethical way. If the products are bad or they're delivered in an unethical way, I have a whole laundry list of problems with that. But if the if the product is good, buy the product. Uh, there's there's a reason good products exist. People like them. The value of having the product is more valuable to me than possessing the money that I could use to buy the products. Like very few people make irrational trades where they're like intentionally buying something that's not going to help them. That's that's super unusual. So all I want to do is give you a path forward. If you are not in a position to be able to buy products, I want you to have something you can use to make progress. If you are in a position to buy products, I just want you to be able to make informed choices about the products you buy. Because I did both back when I was in your shoes. I did a bunch of free stuff that did not work. I did a bunch of paid products that did not work. And then I had to put a bunch of pieces together for myself that didn't really exist at the time in the popular literature, so to speak. And again, that's that's why we started TGS in the first place, was to try to fill that gap for all of you. So hopefully we've done that today. I think that's more than enough for that topic. I don't want to muddy the waters. Um I think if you if you if if you feel confused, going back and re-listening to what we just talked through, I think would help a lot. But hopefully I've made it clear. Uh, number one, what is pattern recognition? Number two, how does it help you? Okay, if I'm recognizing things more often and using productive strategies more often and I'm able to recognize those faster and execute them better. Okay, I can see how that could lead to a higher score. Hopefully I've connected those dots for you. And then hopefully I've also filled in the gap that I think is missing in a lot of uh GMAC content of okay, what do I do? What do I do when I sit down to study tonight to make that happen? And you have one error log for questions you knew how to do but got wrong. You have another error log for questions you did not know how to do. And I've already gone long on how to put those into practice. And so hopefully you're like, cool, if I do that, I have a strong expectation that my score is gonna go up on the next practice exam. And I just want to be clear, as long as you are putting enough time into the process before that next exam, like splitting out the two error logs tonight and doing nothing else and then taking a practice exam tomorrow, yeah, that's probably not gonna be enough. Just in case that wasn't obvious. So, yeah, if you're gonna adopt my approaches, I do need you to invest reasonable effort in applying those approaches well, not applying them crappily or with, you know, bad effort. Just in case, again, that was not obvious. And I don't have any magic wands here. If I had a magic wand that I could wave to instantly improve your GMAS score with no effort on your behalf, I would for sure wave that wand for you. I would do that. The next best thing is, okay, you're gonna put effort into this. Let's have you put effort into the right thing that's actually gonna work. So hopefully I've given you that next best thing. Okay, if you have questions on any of this, like I said, reach out anytime. Our contact info is on the site and also uh sorry, it's it's on the blog. It's not on the main site, it's on the blog in the footer. And there should also be a link to that in the description of this content. So feel free to reach out if you have questions. As always, my greatest hope is that this material will make your studies as easy and painless as they can possibly be. If you want more tips and strategies for optimizing your performance on the exam, please head to our website, thegmatstrategy.com, and check out our free video on how you can reach your dream G Mat score in half the normal time, like I mentioned before. In the meantime, this is a regular show. So if you like it, please subscribe. And if you don't, that's cool. And at the very least, please stay positive and stay consistent with your studies, everybody. Your success matters, and you becoming more successful definitely helps the world. Talk to you all soon.