How Writing Down More Improves Your GMAT® Score

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the GMAT Strategy Podcast. You're here because you believe there's a better way to study for the G Mat, and so do we. We created the GMAT Strategy to maximize your results and minimize your efforts so you can get to the fun parts about business school and life as quickly as possible. My name is Isaac Poolia, and I've been teaching G MAT classes and tutoring privately for the GMAT for over a decade, and I've helped thousands of students get into the business schools of their choice. I'm excited to be a part of your MBA journey since we all at TGS believe that our world can benefit from the best possible business leaders that we can find. If this show is bringing you value, please share it with your friends and family who are studying so that together we can make this process as easy and as painless as it can possibly be. Let's go. Today, let's talk about how Scratchwork improves your GMAT score. This is a really important topic that is very rarely discussed. And part of that is we're not going to get a lot of search volume on these keywords, so to speak. And the whole point of this podcast is if you if you knew what to search for, you might already have the score. It's kind of the weird part about the MBA journey and the GMAT journey. And a lot of the info is out there, but it does get buried by the more popular search terms like hardest GMAT quant questions and that kind of more, more buzzwordy, more intuitive sounding stuff that just really seems like it's going to be the key to the goal score. And for some of you, it will be. I really want to open with that. Like some of you maybe just need to do some questions and you're going to get the score. But that in my experience, that's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the GMAP population. The overwhelming number of us really struggle with the exam. And we think we're just going to memorize some stuff and get the score, like school tests, or we're going to, you know, put in a good two, three months, and we feel like we're going to get a lot of practice questions under our belt and then we're going to get the 99th percentile. And again, that does happen sometimes, but it is not the majority of us. It was not me. My my prep took about three times as long as I thought it was going to. And the huge thing I'm doing here with our free content is sharing a lot of those lessons that I learned in that process so that that doesn't happen to you. And that's a huge part of why we're making this episode, even though, yeah, we're not like playing this the search engine optimization game with this one. We're playing the help people get the score as fast as possible game. So hopefully that's the game that you want to be in, because that's definitely the game that that we want to be in. Nothing against search engine optimization, everybody. I I think it's a great thing. I'm I'm passionate about all those sides of businesses and and and being a hyper optimizer. And I think that's super cool. But at the end of the day, if your company doesn't have a heart and soul to drive the search engine optimization, then honestly, what are we doing? Honestly. You know, we're just optimizing for the sake of optimizing. I mean, I guess that's a cool pastime. I guess I can't hate. I can't hate when it all said and done, everybody. But anyway, we're here to help. So let's get down to business. And if you understand how scratch work improves your Gmas 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 scratch work 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 skill, the score does not materialize. That can be extremely frustrating and a whole other host of terrible words that will go unmentioned beyond frustrating. Um 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 I'm just gonna 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 you and you, 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. Um Having said that, what I've realized that's a little unexpected from 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 it's so simple, and that's part of the reason I love it because it's very hard to forget it. And it's also very easy to audit. Look at my last practice test. Did I write what was asked and what was given a hundred percent of the time on the quad section? Okay. If I didn't, did I miss questions I knew how to do? If I did, that is probably the number one fix. It is probably that simple, but because it is so simple and I would say just so counterintuitive, it just really doesn't feel like it's gonna work. It's like, come on, man, you gotta be kidding me. Like that's that's what I'm that's what you got a podcast on. You got a podcast on telling me what to write uh on a quant question on the GMAT, like what? This is crazy, right? It just does not sound like that's that's gonna work. And this is part of the reason it's not gonna get the search volume because like very few people are selling very much GMAT prep on the back of like, hey, you know what I'm gonna teach you? I'm gonna teach you to always write what's ass on a quant question. Okay. So that's why it's really important that you and I have this conversation right now, because most like it's just we're not, people are not incentivized to push that. But they should. They should be pushing it, and it's just it's just because they don't understand how businesses work. And that's a much, much longer discussion. And this is the whole reason you're on this path. And I won't ruin the surprise for you when you get to your MBA program, but you learn how businesses work really well. Let's put it that way. And uh yeah, we'll just pause there. But back to your GMAT prep, if you just wrote what was asked 100% of the time on 100% of quant questions and always wrote what's given on 100% of your quant questions, even under time pressure, that would solve at least 50%. This is my guess, at least 50% of the questions that you currently know how to do, but are currently not getting credit for. Probably more. Probably more. So it's it's a simple concept, but it's not always simple to implement it. So if you struggle with implementation, like you're like you're like, okay, Isaac, I buy it. You've done this a lot. I'm here because I want your advice on this thing. You're telling me what's right what's given and write right what's asked is gonna help me. Cool. I'm I'm gonna do it. If you're if you're okay buying into that, but you are not, but but it's so hard to do it under pressure, then that's that's a kind of a separate thing. That's more about implementation and execution. And if you need help with implementation and execution, then we'll link some episodes on those specific topics below. So we've got an episode on how to be more disciplined in your prep, which directly translates to how to be more disciplined in your performance. And we've got an entire episode on how to be more consistent in your approach to the exam, which will help you be more consistent in general. But that's that's not really the point of the episode. The point of the episode is to be more consistent with your GMAT score, uh, which of course is our promise here. So if you struggle with implementation, those episodes are there for you. But for now, I'm just gonna assume that you could theoretically write what's given and asked 100% of the time if you committed to it. And that can take you super far. But that's that's usually not the whole story. That's probably not gonna solve a hundred percent of the knew how to do it but got it wrong in quant for most of you. But it'll, again, solve a significant portion of that. So you should do it. If you're making a lot of computation errors, though, that usually doesn't have to do with not writing what's given and asked. Writing what's given and asked is is more counterintuitive because it just it seems like if I just read what the question is asking me, then I'm gonna then I'm gonna know it and I'm gonna remember it. And like, how can I forget that? But as many of you might have realized if you've been studying for a while, it's actually quite easy to forget what's being asked and solve for the wrong thing. But that's a different issue than I wrote what was asked, I didn't forget what was asked, but I did five plus five equals 11. That's different than I lost track of the big picture of the question. So writing what's given and asked will help you keep track of the big picture and also the constraints, which are critically important for strategizing well. But if you're making a lot of computation errors, you'll usually want a different fix in terms of, hey, write more down. I know that that was my main point, like write more down, but like I said, it's not always obvious what you should be writing down to get results. So if you're making a lot of computation errors, just always write every single step of your computation. If you want the simplest, simplest fix that you can implement that will work, always write every step of your computation. If you genuinely wrote every single step of your computation, it would be very, very, very hard not to catch computation errors as they happen. We all make computation errors. Uh, I guess I can't say 100% of us, but like just basically all of us. It rounds up to 100%. And even at my level, having done this for a long time and like seen, I don't even know, millions of GMAC questions at this point. I'll still I'll still make computation errors. It's just that I'll catch them before they ruin the problem for me. And I think that's a really important point to make, is obviously it would be great if we could wave a magic wand and never make a computation error again, but we're all human. Like, I don't know if that's even realistic or even desirable because sometimes the effort and strain that that causes, like the perfectionist tendencies that that brings out, are counterproductive. So instead, I think you just want to get good at catching computation errors as they happen before it wrecks the whole problem. It's not a big deal if you write five plus five equals 11, and then you're like, wait, wait, wait, that's wrong. And then you fix it immediately and then and then keep rolling with the question. Like, that's that's normal. That's totally normal. And I just want you to know that's probably happening to me in the quant section, I don't know, at least three or four times uh per section. And and but I'm just catching it, and so I rarely miss questions I know how to do. And that's just a result of conditioning myself and honestly just feeling the pain of missing questions I know how to do for months and months and not seeing my quant score move, even though my quant knowledge was increasing, increasing, increasing. And again, don't want that to happen to you if we can avoid it. Now, regarding writing more down in general, a lot of people feel a lot of resistance to that. It feels like it's gonna make me super slow. And there's already so much time pressure in the quant section that it feels like any slowing down of anything I'm doing is gonna be like shooting myself in the foot. And that's totally normal. And I felt that resistance too. And there are two options there. Number one, you can just push through it, give it a shot on your next practice set. And then if you can make it work on your practice sets, you can give it a shot on your next practice test. And I I realize I should be saying this more often, so I'm gonna make this commitment today and start today. The advice I'm giving you, everybody, is is designed to be like if you could implement it perfectly on your next practice exam tomorrow or tonight, it would work. Like it would definitely get you a higher score. Uh, but just being human is really, really hard to put stuff into practice with without any experience. So all the advice I'm giving you, the the background assumption, and again, I should have been more clear about this for the last, I don't know, six years or whatever that we've been doing the pod seven now. Um I should have been more clear up front from the beginning that all of this stuff usually takes practice to get good at it. Uh, I would say at least a few hours of conditioning yourself, and then under time pressure, it it you should see the positive results or at least a nice step in the right direction. So I don't, I don't I'm I don't want you to think this is some kind of magic wand because that does not exist in GMAT prep. But the but there that the next best thing, like the next best thing to the limitless pill or the magic wand, uh does exist in GMAT Prep and it's it's just write more down in the quant section. So that's how Scratch work improves your GMAT score in the quant section. Now, if you if you have trouble just pushing through and just forcing yourself to write the stuff, then the other thing that might help is understanding how the scoring algorithm works better. And uh we've got a blog post on this that we'll link below. Let me just make a note. And we've also got a free video on our website that will help you understand how the scoring algorithm works better and help you be a little bit more comfortable uh giving away some questions, like not investing heavily in some of the questions, in order to make time for the questions you actually know how to do. And if you if you haven't taken the time to understand how the scoring algorithm works and understand that it's okay if you miss a few hard questions, if you haven't taken that time, then you're gonna be too obsessive about answering every single question. And that's probably lowering your score because it's probably causing you to miss questions you know how to do because you're rushing through those in order to make time for the hard questions. I actually went long on that philosophy in the uh how to break through GMAT score plateaus episode, which is a few episodes back. So feel free to search the feed for that. And uh, I'll also try to get everybody to link that for you in the description. Let me just make a note here. Yeah. Okay. So it's a deep philosophy, that whole like trading hard questions for more easy questions thing. And uh, it can be a lot to wrap your mind around. I don't want to derail us here in case you've mastered it already. But if you haven't mastered it, those are some resources that can help you master that mindset, which was essential for me back in the day. And I was just ruthlessly banging my head against the wall. Work ethic was not the issue for me back in the day when I was in your shoes, uh, but strategy was nowhere to be found for me. So hopefully um, I've given you the tools that I was missing, and and hopefully this is gonna go great for you. Okay, that's quant. How does scratch work improve my verbal score? Let's start with reading comprehension. The number one complaint that I hear about reading comprehension is that the passages are hard to read or they take a long time to read, which is just another way of saying that they're hard to read. And um, that's by design. That's by design. So the GMAT test writers, like their job is to make the test hard enough that even the absolute smartest, most capable, most genetically gifted of us take the test and get separated from the slightly less smart and slightly less genetically gifted, and then separate those people from the slightly less smart and slightly less genetically gifted, such that there are, I think, five or six different ways that you can score in the hundredth percentile, meaning you are outscoring so many people who've taken the GMAT that there isn't even a full percentage point to account for all those people. So your score is so high it rounds up to 100. Uh you're outscoring 100% of people. Okay, so that's that's a difficult job if you think about the job that the test writers have to differentiate that that uh like the hair breadths between hair breadths of of capability on this test. That's hard to do. And then you have to separate all those people from just the ruthless grinder type people. You might know a few of those, who maybe aren't the genetically gifted, you know, got got a hundredth percentile score coming out of the womb. Uh, but are willing to just bury everybody with work ethic. And you might know some people like this. They will just not stop. And uh and just thank goodness for those people, man. Uh, you, you all of you out there, you are my heroes. Um, and I look up to you so much. Um, but then we have to separate those people from the people who are just they're not willing to go all in, but they're willing to work somewhat hard. And then we have to separate those people from the people who are willing to work kind of hard. And then we have to separate those people from, and you get the point. Okay. So this is a hard job to do. So how do you do that? Well, you have to have some questions that are so diabolical, so diabolical, that unless you are just the most genetically gifted test taker of all time, there's just no way you're getting it right in a reasonable amount of time. Like, yeah, I bet if we gave you 30 minutes, you could crack it. But even then, some GMAC questions, you might have seen these already with even 30 minutes, you still wouldn't be able to figure it out. It's just an absolute mystery. And so those questions exist, and you might see some of those questions as a result of how the scoring algorithm works. And that's why it's so important to understand the algorithm, and that's why we made that video for you, and that's why it's free. Okay. So we're doing our best to give this away to the maximum extent possible. And just give us feedback on that video. If you're like, hey, I didn't get it, send us a note. You we're very easy to get in touch with. We've got our all our contact information linked for you in the description. You can DM us at the GMAT Strategy on current social channels. We even have ways you can text us. Uh, I won't uh say the number right now because it might change over time, but it's on the contact page. Uh, this is not like a sign up for my texting service and get regular text updates. It's it's not that. It's like you can just text us like we're your buddy, and we will help you out. Uh, same thing with email. You can email us contact at thegmatstrategy.com anytime you want. We will get back to you and we will help you. And we will not try to sell you anything unless you're like, hey, can I buy stuff from you guys? Um and we're really committed to that. So uh all that to say is we're doing everything we can to help you understand that. And it and even with all that, it's still difficult to understand. So this is that's okay. That's okay. It's a very counterintuitive thing. But once you understand that, you will understand why some of the passages that you read on Reading Comp are just feel impossible. It's just like, why? Why did they cook this up? Why am I reading this right now? This is crazy. And that's okay. That's by design because they have to differentiate between all the types of people who take the GMAT. And some people are just really good. They're just so, so good. And we still need some of those people to miss questions every once in a while so we can separate out the separate out the test takers who are even better than that. So it's it's definitely a crazy hard thing. And when you realize that those passages are hard by design, then you you can just accept it and stop wishing for the passages to get easier and instead just build a strategy that helps you perform on hard passages better. And I think that that set of subconscious beliefs that I just walked through is really, really powerful when you can see it for what it is and just realize, like, oh, okay, I don't need these to get easier. I just need, I just need to get better. Um, and that's that's a lot more empowering than than feeling like there's this evil external force that's acting upon you and keeping you from reaching your dreams. I know it might feel like that a lot of the times, but like that's I haven't found that to be a productive way of looking at it, if that makes sense. Like that's very unlikely to enhance your performance. Whereas looking at it as like, okay, this is a significant challenge, but I can get better at it and I can use scratch work to help me, I think you'll probably see a lot more improvement from thinking about it that way. So that's what we're gonna do. So you want to take notes on reading comprehension. And again, a lot of the pushback I get on that when I recommend that to people is I don't have time for that, or that's gonna slow me down. So again, now we're back to the scoring algorithm, and a lot of stuff just comes back to that. So I won't harp on that more than I already have. But it's okay to be a little slower on questions you know how to do if you realize it's okay to miss some questions that are too hard for you. If you understand that, then it's all good. So once we get to that, we can we can start to devise a good note-taking approach. And a good note-taking approach on reading comp is not about recalling what's in the text. And this is, I think, where a lot of people get totally sideways with this. They they think of taking notes like you would take in like a college class, like, oh, I gotta understand all this stuff, I gotta capture all the details, I'm gonna be tested on this at a later date. I need to memorize this or I'm gonna fail out and my parents are gonna disown me. I mean, people are really thinking like that. Okay, hopefully it's not you, but um, if it is, hopefully you're channeling that into something positive. Let's put it that way. Um But the main way that good scratch work improves your reading comp performance is um accepting that it's not a good idea to take notes to recall everything in the passage. That's gonna lead to too many notes that are counterproductive, and that will slow you down too much, with probably without benefiting your score very much. Now, again, this is a very generalized format. If you're taking a lot of notes and you're already getting an amazing performance on reading comp, don't stop doing that. Like keep doing what you're doing if you're getting good results. If you're not getting good results, then that is the time to change. Um, because obviously repeating the same actions and expecting different outputs is very rare, rarely gonna work out. Um, so even just letting go of the idea that taking notes is designed to help me recall everything that's in the text, even just letting go of that can be a huge relief. So hopefully, even just that is helpful. A good note taking approach on reading comp is about helping you process the data in the text more efficiently. And that's a very, very different reason to take notes than most of us are used to. Most of us are taking notes because we want to remember. What we're note taking on, not because we want to process what we're listening to or reading in in a more efficient way. In fact, it seems less efficient. So again, we're back to uh me just giving you tons of insanely counterintuitive advice. But let's be real, everybody, if if this process were intuitive, there would be no reason to have this podcast right now. You would have already gotten the score and you would be already doing the celebration dance and you'd already be in business school. The fact that it is counterintuitive necessitates having these potentially challenging conversations. And I apologize for that. But if you step back and think about it, it's actually a good thing that the GMAT is difficult because that's how you know the people that you're going to business school are like fully legit. Uh, because without hard things, how do you know that the people around you are capable of doing hard things? And how do you know that you can start a hard business, which are always the most valuable businesses, are the ones that are hard. How do you know you can do that with these people? Well, it's really nice if you just could verifiably check, like, okay, this person's capable of hard stuff. Cool. Noted. Like that, that just decreases a lot of friction, and that's part of the value of business school in the first place. So, yes, it can be hard to accept that we need to earn our spot. Maybe everybody should just be given this, these skills uh totally freely. We're not here to debate that. We're here to talk about given that that is not the case, that is not the way the game is operating right now, how do how do we still get what we want out of this? Okay. We're we are that's that's the conversation we're having. So I often back back to good note-taking is about helping you process the data more efficiently. I often coach people just to write the main idea of each section of a reading cop. So if the if there's like four paragraphs, just what's the main idea of each paragraph? Or if the if it's just one big paragraph, maybe split it into two blocks and say, like, what's the main idea of the first half? What's the main idea of the second half? And I often coach people on that because people are usually taking too many notes. There's too much scratch work if they are taking notes, or they're taking no notes at all. And either of those extremes, I believe, is generally counterproductive. Again, if you're getting good results with your approach, don't change it. But the vast majority of people, let's say 85% or more, uh, they they are operating at either of those extremes counterproductively. And so we want to get into a sweet spot, a middle ground between those two things where you're writing more than zero, but you're not obsessively trying to capture every detail. And the reason that trying to capture every detail is a bad idea is that the passage never disappears. The passage just stays there as you're answering every single question. So you can always go back and look at it. In fact, that's usually a good idea to double check. Is A right? I don't know. Let me just check the passage. It's supposed to tell me whether A is right or not. And so if I can always go back and look at the text, what is the point of trying to recall everything in the text? That's a waste of energy. Again, if you if writing a lot down helps you memorize the text perfectly and then answer every question super fast, great, keep doing it. I'm never gonna argue with your results. But if you're not yet seeing the results you want to see on RC, or you're curious if there's a next level for you, then that's the way to go. Just start by writing the main idea of every section of the passage. And then if you need more detailed information, just go back to the text if you're asked about it. But you're never gonna be asked about everything in a reading comp. That will never, ever, ever happen. You will never see three or four questions that force you to recall literally every detail that you've read. So why would you try to process every detail on the first read? Just capture the main ideas, read everything, and then go back if you need more detail. And that's how taking notes as you read can help you process the information better. Because if you don't have that snapshot of the big picture, if you're getting lost in the details either by not taking notes and forgetting everything that's that was in there, or by taking too many notes and getting sucked into the details and spending too much time, then you won't have time to go back and find the parts of the passage where they do give you the answer. But if you have a sort of broad overview of, okay, here's where this piece is, here's where we're discussing this thing, here's where we're discussing that thing, oh, they're asking me about the thing at the end, let me just go reread that real quick. Oh, they're asking me about the thing in the beginning, in the middle, let me just reread those parts real quick. And again, counterintuitively, I think it's that lighter first read to save time to go back and forth when you're diagnosing the answer choices, tends to lead to overall greater speed, even though it often feels slower or reckless, uh, like too fast, like you're not absorbing all the details and you feel irresponsible. Most of us are caught between those two extremes. So again, better scratch work of just the main idea of each section really helps you focus on an efficient first read. So just focus on the main points, let the details fall by the wayside. If you're asked about those later, you can always go back and reference them, and in fact, you should. We've got a whole episode on reading comprehension strategy. It's from a few years back, but it's it's still so relevant because reading comp has really not changed at all in the last like 20 years. It's exactly the same as it was 20 years ago. So that episode I think is like six or seven years old, and it's just as relevant today as it was then. Now, the exam changed a few years ago, so some of the like question numbers that I might say might be a little bit dated, but the strategy itself, gold mine. Okay, so the key is don't take quote unquote normal notes on reading comp. That's gonna go against what the test is all about. Instead, just take very light notes. Don't worry about the details. You can always go back and look at those later. That's how good scratch work helps you on reading comp. How does good scratch work help you on critical reasoning? Well, on critical reasoning, you should write down what the main conclusion is 100% of the time. One of the biggest reasons people miss critical reasoning is not that they didn't identify the conclusion properly, although that is a huge problem for people, especially when they're just starting out. But usually when you have a lot of experience, you can identify the main conclusion properly. Usually the big pitfall is that people lose track of the main conclusion when they're going through the answer choices. And that's because CR answer choices are really complicated, especially on the hard ones, and it takes a lot of brain power to process them. And our brains can really only hold so much in their short-term memory before they just start to short circuit and like boot stuff out of memory. And um yeah, the conclusion can kind of get pushed out of short-term memory if that's happening. So to counteract that, a really simple way to keep that from happening is just take take notes on what the conclusion is telling you once you find it it is that's a blue. Okay, we'll just leave it at that. Now, the last tip for how scratch work can help your verbal score is um just writing A, B, C, D, and E down for every question and tracking your elimination as you go. I see a surprisingly small number of people do that. A lot of people are holding the answers in their head or using their hands. Again, if holding it in your head or using your hands is really helping you, keep doing it. Um, but if you haven't experimented with just writing A, B, C, D, E and tracking like whether it's a plus, minus, positive, negative, full elimination, partial elimination, that kind of thing, it can really decrease the amount of rethinking you need to do when you're deciding between options at the end of verbal questions, which is quite common. It's quite common to get rid of two or three on the first pass and then have to go back and re-reason through some of the remaining options. And that can help streamline that for you. Okay, so simple, simple thing that could have a massive positive effect for you. So that's how Scratchwork improves my quant score and my verbal score. So how does scratch work improve your DI score? Well, as you're probably aware, a lot of data insights questions are are just a combination of verbal and quant skills. And so a combination of the recommendations that I've given you can can definitely help. But I'll also have like a uh DI specific recommendation in a second. But uh, for example, in questions that are similar to reading comp, like tons and tons of text, like you'll often see in some DI questions, take notes as you read. Note the big picture of each section and avoid getting too lost in the details. Much like reading comp, on DI questions, you will basically never be asked about everything that's in those long passages. The only exception is data sufficiency. Many data sufficiency questions uh do give you information and all of that information is critical. But if it's not data sufficiency, which is the fact one, fact two questions, if you're just starting out, then you will you will always be given too much information. So the skill they're testing there is sifting through information and finding the key information. Again, I'll give you a tip for that in a second. But right now, the first tip is treat it like a reading cop. If I if I'm not going to be asked about all this, why would I try to why would I try to know all of it? Let me just get the broad strokes, and then I'll go back and at least I'll know where to look after my first read. That's similar to the verbal. Similar to the math, write out all the computation, even if you're using the calculator. And I know that might just sound absolutely crazy, but you don't need to write down everything you're computing with your calculator, but make sure you're writing down the results of what you're computing in the calculator, because again, it's just easy to get lost. And because we're not conditioning ourselves with the calculator very often, because a lot of people say don't use it, which I fully disagree with. You should use the calculator a lot of DI, in my opinion. I've seen great results with that with thousands of people. Um it's just it's it's just really counterintuitive to continue to track and write that stuff down as you're punching in the calculator. So you don't need to write down every single computation in the calculator, but write down big results, like places where you might forget things or get lost, or things that have units. Always keep track of that, even if you're using the calculator. But if you're not using the calculator much on DI and you're having success with that, then continuing to write down your computation will probably save you one or two questions at least per section that you might be making computation errors on. Okay, so that's kind of expected, I would think that like a lot of the general advice I just gave about verbal and quant would apply to DI, because a lot of general advice about verbal and quant applies to DI in general. But the big unlock that I've seen with Scratchwork and DI is writing what every question asks you. And a shockingly small number of people do this. Uh, most of the time, when I see folks miss DI questions, it's because they missed a keyword in the question, not in the text that's given. And I think that's a huge surprise for a lot of people because it just feels like this overwhelming block of text or multiple tabs I'm looking at is going to be the big demon. Uh, but a lot of times it's the short piece where they pack like five or six keywords in a row. And if I miss one of those five keywords in the question, then I'm totally toast and there's no way I'm gonna get it right, even if I get all the right data from the text. That just happens so crazily often in in DI. Now it's it's not a hundred percent of people's DI misses, perhaps, obviously. I want to be clear about that. But I would say that's the key for people who've been studying for a while and have really done a good job on the content side. I would say that's the key more than 50% of the time. Um, so if you give it a shot, I hope that serves you as well as it served me. And again, don't expect it to just magically help you on the next practice test you're taking tomorrow. Like put some time into doing it well. Very few things, even the best advice, is probably not going to work if you do it poorly. So you don't have to do it perfectly, but just focus on like, okay, am I implementing Isaac's advice well? Am I at least putting a reasonable amount of effort into implementing this advice? Because if you're doing a crappy job implementing, then like even the best advice in the world will probably not work. Okay, now that might be obvious, but it's just good to be reminded of those important and obvious truths sometimes. It would be hard to be reminded of those too much. I'll just speak for myself. Okay, so that is the full rundown of what I believe will apply to a wide variety of people in a public format. Again, if you and I were working one-on-one, I'd probably have more specific advice to give you. But that is probably not practical for a bunch of reasons. And so this is the next best thing for now. So, how does scratch work improve my quant score? Writing what's given and asked will help me keep track of the big picture and strategize better. And then writing down all my computation will keep me from missing questions that I know how to do the math on, because I'll catch computation errors before they hurt me. Writing down main points and avoiding writing down details on reading comp will speed me up productively while still anchoring me in the text and making sure that I don't read the entire passage, get to the bottom, and think, wait, what did I just read? Because I zoned out. And then on CR, writing down the main conclusion will help you from losing track of the main conclusion because that's so critical when I get down to option E and I'm going back and forth between D and E. It's really helpful to remember what the main conclusion is in critical reasoning, regardless of what techniques you're using for that. And then in verbal tracking your answers, A, B, C, D, E every time should really decrease the amount of back and forth that you need to do as well. And even five, 10 seconds per question saved there can really help from a time and an energy perspective. That's that's a point that's worth making for sure. Finally, in DI, taking some light notes as you would on reading comp for long text can really, really help with the big picture and getting and avoid being getting lost in the details. Writing out all your computation when you have to do math, whether you're using the calculator or not, will keep you from doing five plus five equals 11 and having that ruin your whole DI question. And then making sure that you capture all the keywords in every DI question will keep you from missing questions that you would have known how to do just because your brain took a vacation for that one word, which, let's be honest, happens to the best of us sometimes on a test where we're sitting there for two and a half hours or more if you have extended time and doing a hundred really hard questions in a row. So if you have questions on any of this, feel free to reach out to us on current social channels. Like I said, you can get in touch with us via DM at the GMass Strategy if you prefer to DM. If you like to email, we're C-O-N-T-A-C-T at the gmasstrategy.com, contact at the gmasstrategy.com. If you're on mobile or you don't want to type that out, you can just click the link that says uh contact in the description and all that information will be there, as well as uh our contact for texting us, as long as we don't get overwhelmed by texting. If those text numbers are not there anymore, just assume we got too many texts. But we've been able to keep up now for quite a few years. So um, yeah, we're we're doing our best to get back to all of you in a reasonable amount of time. And please just be patient with us if you don't hear back from us right away. As always, my greatest hope is that this material will make your studies as easy and as painless as they can possibly be. If you want more tips and strategies for optimizing your performance on the exam, please head to our website, thegmatstrategy.com, and check out our video on how you can reach your dream G Math score in half the normal time. Like I said, it's free. In the meantime, this is a regular show. So if it's helpful, please subscribe. And at the very least, please stay positive and stay consistent with your studies, everybody. Talk to you soon.