Hi,

please help me on this question. This problem is doing my head in, as we say in the UK.

I'm very confused as to what to do with my error log AFTER I've completed thorough analysis of a problem question - do I put it into the error log to reattempt later down the track and mark it as 'unresolved' in the error log, or do I forget about it and just assume the information has sunk in?

I saw this post on the MGMAT site somewhere:
"
Short drills of mixed-topic problems from the Official Guides.

The GMAC has already done the prep work for you – they’ve jumbled up the problems by topic but arranged them in order of difficulty. So do 5-10 problems in a row. Don’t skip any. Treat the exercise “as if” you were taking the GMAT. And then spend double the time afterwards reviewing and mastering each problem."

the question is, what do I do concerning the error log for that problem after I've done this:
"And then spend double the time afterwards reviewing and mastering each problem."

This is the biggest thing holding me back - I just dont know what to do with the error log after the first 'iteration' of putting a problem in there - do I need to go back and redo every single question in the error log over and over until I get them 100% correct without any problems? I feel I'm getting so bogged down in the error log, marking off questions as 'mastered/not mastered','correct/incorrect' etc. and going back to those questions over, and over, and over again until they're mastered...

For each Q, decide whether it's something you want to look at again / attempt again in future. Give that a Yes/No/Maybe answer.

Then, in 3+ weeks, when you want to do a set of mixed review, you can pull a bunch of random Yes and Maybe Qs and give yourself a random set. How much did you remember? How well are you doing on those now? Toss in a couple of the No Qs, too - did you get them right easily? If not, you may have to reconsider the criteria you're using to label something a No (I don't want to look at this again).

If you're labeling questions by content area, you might label something a "maybe" for now, and then 3 weeks from now you might say - okay, how many "overlapping set" questions have I done so far and what's my collective performance? Am I making any of the same mistakes over and over? Let's sort the spreadsheet (if you're using a spreadsheet) or search for the language "overlapping" and see.

Oh, hmm. I've done 5 of these in the past month, and on two of them, I made the mistake of solving for the wrong thing (eg, they ask me about Bobby and I solve for Sue). And, hey, I remember doing that on a Percent problem last week, too. Okay, I've got to do something about this error I keep making - solving for the wrong thing. How am I going to do that? Etc.

And, no, don't feel like you have to get things 100% correct. You may decide that you've mastered something because you know how to make a good educated guess, and that's really what you'd do if you saw this one on the real test because it's too hard or takes too long. (And if you get better at this thing later, then you can still review it again from the point of view of how to get it right.)

Your goal on every question is to try to learn something substantial that will help you get better. Lots of times, that will mean knowing how to get it right, but not always. :)

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT