Princeton Review Practice Tests - IR help

Hello, gmattaker3397, and welcome to GMAT Club. First, take any score from a third party with a grain of salt. Several years back, I took a free Princeton Review mock online through a library book I had checked out. Despite missing two Quant questions, my sub-score for the section came out to something ridiculous around 40. (Mind you, it is possible to miss two questions in the section on the actual exam and still earn a perfect 51, even if those would need to be harder questions.) Verbal, too, came out low, and my predicted score was just under 700. I did not bother looking through the rest of the book, not just because I was upset, but also because I had not scored below that mark (or anywhere near it) since my first official practice test, when I did not really understand the format of the exam. This is not to say that the strategies you may find in Princeton Review material are useless—they may be sound. Just do not think that there is one way you must prepare for the IR section, a major component of which is simply reading carefully. Make sure you know exactly what the question is asking you to do. It is easy to stumble into traps, and it is also easy to get sidetracked and spend way too much time on a problem if you have not taken the time to adequately understand what you are asked to do and what information you have.

I would recommend practicing official questions exclusively, those identified as GMAT Prep questions on this site. They may not be the most accessible, but I have gone ahead and run a search on all 600-700-level questions. That should give you plenty to practice, and you can place confidence in the results. I would recommend starting at Medium until you can consistently achieve 4/5 correctly answered questions in a set. Many of the harder questions are Hard not because they are inherently more difficult, but because they provide better traps, those that more people fall into, or the problem takes a little longer to work through than most others. If you can hit your benchmark on Medium questions—again, on a consistent basis—then you will be ready for the more challenging ones.

Finally, unless you are taking the Executive Assessment, the IR section, like the AWA portion, does not factor into your score or matter much to admissions committees. A 4 is good enough for just about any school, even an M7, as long as the total score, the part that programs report, is there. Do not place undue pressure on yourself to ace the section when it does not carry much weight at all in earning you a place at your program of choice.

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew