Hello,

First of all, I am very bad at multiple choice exams. So far I have done 10 of the practice questions of the Arithmetic II book, and I have gotten 1/10 correct, they are just so tricky!!. What should I do? What do you recommend I do to improve?



Thank you.

Hey tlaloc,

Thanks for writing! You know, that Arithmetic book is deceiving in its title...I'd argue that 30% or so of the hardest math questions we have overall reside within Arithmetic, so don't let a low "score" on that homework ruin your confidence. That's a book in which everyone should miss their fair share - the goal is to challenge you to think about math from different perspectives to be able to think more in line with GMAT-style math questions.

So there's no reason to panic! But there's a lot you can do to improve upon that:

1) If you feel like your fundamental math skills are just rusty or need work, revisit the Math Essentials (lesson 0) book to ramp those up. "Arithmetic" may sound basic, but those are GMAT problems with some real subtlety to them; the Math Essentials book is more focused on pure math fundamental skill-building.

2) Revisit the problems you got wrong and learn from them. Why did you fall for a trap answer? Which step or concept didn't you quite see at first? How can you ensure that you know better next time? I'd rather that people miss a lot of problems but then learn quite a bit from than watch them luck into a few right answers and never fully analyze that problem/concept. Embrace your mistakes as learning opportunities.

3) Visit our Office Hours online - there's another category on the forum here via which you can enter our Live Online Office Hours (Sundays, 6-8pm Eastern) and talk with an instructor about your mistakes. Collaboratively working on problems like that helps quite a bit - again, each problem is a learning opportunity.