A student once came up to me with an interesting problem - she said she was very good at Critical Reasoning and rather weak in Reading Comprehension so she had devised a strategy in which she spent a lot more time on her strength, which was CR, and comparatively lesser time on RC, which was her weakness.
In fact she said she had been practicing the most difficult of CR questions and getting them correct in quick time, yet her scores were not improving. She wanted to know why this was the case and whether there was some problem with the testing software.
The answer is actually very simple - the strategy of concentrating on your strengths and ignoring your weaknesses would work very well on a paper-based test such as the Common Admission Test in India.
BUT the GMAT is a Computer Adaptive test!
What this means is that even though this student was very good at CR the fact that she was doing badly on RC meant that RC kept pulling her score down as she never got to see the difficult CR questions and as you must already be aware how high you score on the GMAT is actually a function of the difficulty level of the questions and not how many you get correct or incorrect.
To Sum it Up:
- In case you are strong in one area and weak in another ideally try to concentrate equally on both of these areas.
- In case you are short of time and must decide between the two, it makes much more sense to concentrate on your weaker area.
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