The Points You're Missing Are EASY

Here is a scene I watch play out every single week. Say you finish a practice Executive Assessment on a Sunday night after a long week at work. You open the review. Where do you go first? Straight to the nastiest question you missed. The one with the weird table and the three part ratio. You spend 45 minutes on it. You watch a video. You feel like you learned something.

Meanwhile, question 4 sits right there. You missed it because you read "least" as "most." You glance at it, mutter "silly mistake," and move on.

THAT is backwards. And it is costing you real points.

I'll bet your easy misses outnumber your hard ones

Pull up your last practice test. Not later. Now. Sort every question you got wrong into two piles.

• Pile one: questions you truly did not know how to do.
• Pile two: questions you KNEW how to do and still missed. You misread it, slipped on the math, clicked the wrong letter, or rushed because you burned five minutes somewhere else.

I'll bet pile two is BIGGER. And if you also count the questions you got right by a lucky guess, I'll bet it is a lot bigger.

Now think about how short this test is. The Executive Assessment is 90 minutes, split into three 30 minute sections: Integrated Reasoning with 12 questions, Verbal Reasoning with 14, and Quantitative Reasoning with 14. That is 40 questions in total. Each section is scored from 0 to 20, your total runs from 100 to 200, and all three sections count the same. You can see the full layout on GMAC's structure page.

Stop reading for a second and do the math. Forty questions. On a test that short, ONE dropped easy question is not a rounding error. It is a real piece of your score, handed back for nothing.

Each section is also adaptive, which means the test responds to how you are doing as you go. If that word scares you, read Adaptive Doesn't Mean DOOMED. The point here is simpler: you cannot afford to give away questions you already know how to answer.

Why the monsters get all your attention

Missing a hard question feels like a gap in your knowledge. That feels fixable, and fixing it feels like progress. Missing an easy question feels like bad luck. So you shrug it off.

It is NOT bad luck. It is a habit. You did work in your head. You skimmed the question. You trusted your gut on a number. Habits repeat, which is the bad news. Habits are also trainable, which is the good news. This is a standardized, predictable test, so the same easy traps show up again and again. Train for them and they stop working on you.

Let me show you what I mean. Both of these look easy. Both are built to catch people who rush.

Neither of those questions needed advanced math. They needed you to slow down for five seconds and write two lines. That is where your points are hiding.

5 ways you're dropping easy points

1. You do the math in your head. You think it's faster. It isn't, and it is exactly how the jacket question gets you.

   INSTEAD: write every step down. Every one. On practice, on Test Day, on questions that feel insultingly easy. Especially those.

2. You read the question once, fast. Then you answer a question that was never asked. "Least" becomes "most." "Not" disappears.

   INSTEAD: find the actual question first and write it at the top of your notes. Before you pick an answer, look back at what you wrote.

3. You fight the monster for six minutes. In Quant you get 30 minutes for 14 questions, which is a little over 2 minutes each on average. Every extra minute you pour into one brutal question gets stolen from easy ones later, and then you rush those and miss them too. That is not a clock problem. As I wrote in Your Pacing Problem Is a SYMPTOM, the clock is just where the real problem shows up.

   INSTEAD: decide in practice what "too long" looks like for you, and when a question crosses that line, make your best guess and move on. On purpose. No guilt.

4. You only review the hard misses. The easy misses get a shrug. The lucky guesses get no look at all.

   INSTEAD: review every miss AND every guess. For each easy miss, write one sentence naming exactly what went wrong. Not "careless." Something real, like "didn't check the negative value."

5. You grind the algebra when a faster tool is sitting right there. This test is not a math exam. It is a thinking test that uses math as the gauge.

   INSTEAD: TEST VALUES. TEST THE ANSWERS. Plug in real numbers like you did with 3 and minus 3. It is faster, and it makes the traps obvious.

So what do you want MORE?

You have to decide. Do you want the thrill of finally cracking the hardest question on the test? Or do you want a higher score? Because those are not the same thing. The person who gets every reasonable question right and calmly lets two monsters go will usually beat the person who wins one war and loses five easy battles.

You're a working professional. You manage people and budgets and deadlines. You already know that the boring, repeatable stuff done right every time is what wins. This test is no different.

Here is your job for tonight. Take your most recent practice test. Build the two piles. For every question in pile two, write one sentence that names the exact mistake. Then redo each of those questions from scratch, on paper, with every step written out. Count how many points were sitting in that pile. Then tell me you still want to spend your next study session on the monster.