How Writing Down More Improves Your GMAT® Score

And if you understand how Scratchwork improves your GMAT score, then it gives you a tremendous edge, an absolutely tremendous edge in terms of competitiveness and in terms of speed to results.

So let's talk about one section at a time, how Scratchwork improves your score.

So how does Scratchwork improve your quantitative score? I've been doing this for a really long time, 24 years in test prep in general, over a decade of that in GMAT, as you're probably aware if you've listened to the intro at all.

And the number one thing that I have seen holding back people's quant scores is missing questions that they know how to do.

And that was the case for me back in the day.

And that tends to be the case for most of us because, again, we come into the arena with this default belief that if I just learn the stuff, I'm going to do well.

And that's a very reasonable belief because that's how tests have worked for us in the past, for most of us.

And so we spend the time, we learn the stuff, we're confident in our content knowledge, and then the score does not materialize.

That can be extremely frustrating and a whole other host of terrible words that will go unmentioned beyond frustrating.

But suffice to say, it's extremely common.

And a lot of that can be fixed with great scratch work.

Maybe not 100% of it, but probably like 80% of the questions people know how to do but get wrong in quant could be fixed with better scratch work.

So I say this a lot, but I'm just going to keep saying it because it is true.

I might have some slightly different advice if I was talking to you one-on-one and we were working together.

But because this is a totally public format and I want this to work for all of you, I am going to give some more generalized advice and I'll give you some... advice about how to implement that depending on what kind of situation you're in.

Okay.

So the number one way to combat missing questions you know how to do in the Quant section is just writing more down.

Like if you just did one thing as a result of listening to this and only what you did was writing more down in the Quant section, your score would likely improve.

So that's hopefully a great ROI on your time spent so far here.

Having said that, what I've realized that's a little unexpected from working with a lot of people on this is knowing what to write down can be a really big challenge.

And I think that's surprising.

It seems like it should be obvious, but it's not always obvious.

So what I've seen work best for the widest number of people is always write what's asked and always write what's given.

It's so simple.

It's so simple and that's part of the reason I love it because it's very hard to forget it.