GMAT® Focus Quant — What You Should Know in 2024 and Beyond

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My name is Isaac Puglia and I've been teaching GMAT® classes and tutoring privately for the GMAT® for almost a decade and I've achieved a 99th percentile score on the GMAT® and helped thousands of students get into the business schools of their choice.

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Today we're excited to talk to you about the GMAT® Quant section and we want to make sure everybody has the baseline information that's critical in 2024 and beyond now that the Quant section is basically brand new and different for the GMAT® Focus Edition, which is the GMAT® going forward.

So let's start with the format of the Quant section. You're going to see 21 questions in 45 minutes. This is slightly more than 2 minutes per question, which is a nice bump up from past exams.

For example, the previous iteration of the GMAT® was 31 questions in 62 minutes — so exactly 2 minutes per question. This is now a nice little bit of a buffer. It's not a huge change but we'll take what we can get when it comes to having enough time to complete these questions properly.

Now on the old version of the GMAT® there were two types of questions in the Quant section. One was called problem solving and the other was called data sufficiency.

Problem solving is the standard five option multiple choice question format that many of you are going to be used to from standardized tests you've taken in the past.

Data sufficiency is a brand new type of question and we're not going to cover that in depth here because it's not in the Quant section anymore.

Now on GMAT® Focus — the way the GMAT® is now going forward — there are only problem solving questions in the Quant section.

So when we say quantitative section going forward, we mean just problem solving questions, which is some text or an equation or a question at the top of the screen and then five option multiple choice that you pick one answer every single time.

There's no multiple option type questions on GMAT® Quant.

That's a big departure if you've been studying for the previous exam. Data sufficiency is still on the GMAT® Focus edition but it's in a different section now, which is called Data Insights, and we'll have an episode all about the Data Insights section coming out in the next couple weeks. But for now we're going to focus on Quant.

So what is the material that is tested? It's basically quantitative or math content through about high school level geometry.

Now GMAC — the people who write the exam — have been very vocal about the fact that there's no geometry on the new version of the GMAT®. But like we've said in the past, we haven't found that to be 100% true. It's like 85% true. So there isn't any heavy geometry computation like there used to be on past iterations of the GMAT®, and let us be specific for you.

So heavy geometric computation would be like: you are presented with a five sided figure that you then need to break down into a bunch of 30-60-90 degree angle triangles and then you need to calculate a side length of the overall figure based on those triangles. Like that's pretty heavy duty geometry computation and we haven't seen any of that on the new exam and nobody else within TGS has either.

Having said that, we have seen some surface level geometry content where you're tested on basic knowledge of the coordinate plane or basic shapes like spheres and cubes. They assume that you know what a cube is, or rectangular boxes, and they might even assume that you know how to calculate the volume of a rectangular box, which if it's been a while since you studied this, is length times width times height.

So to us that's not "no geometry" — that's still geometry content. We're still having our students go through some surface level geometry content, memorizing all the basic formulas, and we recommend that you do the same irrespective of what your current provider is telling you about geometry on the exam. It is there, but it's not super in depth in terms of having to do a lot of geometric manipulation. And that's the best, most clear we can be right now based on our current level of data, because the new exam has only been live officially for a couple months now.

And we're doing our best to stay on top of it. But we promise everything we've told you so far and everything we're about to tell you in this episode is validated with at least 10 data points, and we will only increase that data set going forward. We want you to know this is stuff we're sharing with you that you can bank on. We're not speculating here. And if there's anything speculative, we will let you know about that. We're just being real with you — that's what we know so far and that's what we recommend in terms of geometry.

So what exactly do we mean with quant content through high school level geometry? If you go backward from how you probably learned math — from geometry toward the past — you'll see things like:

• Algebra — manipulating equations and expressions
• Exponent math and square root math — manipulating complicated exponents, negative exponents, that kind of thing
• Arithmetic — especially with decimals and fractions. And there's no calculator on the quant section. There is a calculator in the Data Insights section — we'll get to that in the Data Insights episode. So if you wished for a calculator in the past on data sufficiency questions, now your wish has come true. But no calculator on problem solving questions in the quant section itself. So you will be asked to do some arithmetic operations usually by hand, which generally necessitates re-learning long subtraction, long division, et cetera. It's all stuff you've known in the past — stuff you can shake the rust off of. Maybe you never had great quant education — this is a good opportunity to do it right and get a better teacher and better support now that you have a little more control over that as an adult.
• Basic counting and sequences — nothing super advanced like crazy sums of sequences or limits like you might have learned in calculus. It doesn't go that far. But you might be asked to find a pattern in a sequence of numbers that allows you to find the sum of the first hundred terms of that sequence. And there are nice little tricks of the trade that you'll learn as you go through your courses of study that will help you with that. We're just listing out the main greatest hits of stuff that you're going to see on the exam so that you're well prepared when you get into studying.
• Basic functions — same idea. You are expected to have a deep knowledge of what a function is. So this would be something like f(x) = y + 10 — you're expected to know what that means and be able to do manipulations based on the basics. But there's not going to be any super complicated graphing or derivatives or anything like calculus or trigonometry. There's no radians, there's no tan, cosine, none of that. It's just stuff that you learned probably before that.
• Basic word problems — translating word problems into algebra. And especially percents — word problems involving percent calculations. That's something we've seen heavily represented on the new GMAT® Quant section. It has always been a big fixture of the exam, but because there were 31 questions in the previous iteration of the Quant section and now there's only 21, we've seen about the same number of percent word problems as there were on the previous exam, which means they are a much bigger percentage of the section now. So if you are not particularly great at percent word problems, that's definitely a place that you're going to want to focus energy at improving. This is the thing we've seen the most of honestly.

But that's pretty much it. The content itself is not particularly advanced. It's more about the style of questions and the way that they ask the question that can make the exam difficult.

So we've got some recommendations for you in terms of how to study the basic content and then also how to study how it's going to show up on the exam to give you an advantage that you otherwise wouldn't have.

So what do we mean by the style of question? Well, technically the section is called Quantitative Reasoning — we just call it the quant section for short. But we should maybe call it the Quantitative Reasoning section. So let's think about what's the difference between just doing math and quantitative reasoning.

Well, if we were going to really break it down, quantitative reasoning is almost more like logic problems that involve math than heavy computation type questions. And we think that is not the perfect description of what happens in the math section, but it's close enough for you to get the idea of what you're going to be up against.

And you're going to see a lot of tricks. You might have already seen this in your prep where you're like, "Wait a minute, I totally knew the exponent content involved in this question, and I still got it wrong because it was asked in a tricky way or a confusing way." That's a lot of what you're going to be up against in the GMAT® quant section.

So if your mind works that way — like you're very puzzle oriented — you might really like the quant section. It might be a natural strength for you. If your mind doesn't work that way, don't worry, it's totally fine to have a more traditional approach. Many different providers out there teach that more traditional, linear approach to solving questions and they kind of treat every quantitative reasoning question as just a math problem, which is fine. You can have success with both styles. And for some of you, you're going to favor one style in certain situations and another style in other situations, and that's fine.

There's a lot of great providers out there who can help you. If you want some recommendations, then go back a few weeks to our episode on how to start your GMAT® studies in 2024 and we'll walk you through a full list of providers, how long each one's going to take, approximate budget for each one, and then we give some recommendations on what we think you should do if you're genuinely unsure and just lost in the marketplace — which is super, super common these days because there's just so much noise out there. And we're doing our best — and all of us behind the scenes at TGS are doing our best — to bring clarity to the marketplace. So please give us feedback and let us know if we are fulfilling on that intention for you and making this easier for you.

So that's the basic rundown of what is on the quant section.

That was the first question we wanted to answer for you, which is like, what is the section? 21 questions in 45 minutes and what is on it?

Couple Extra Tips

We already talked about how there's no calculator. So what does that mean? It means that hand computation is extremely important.

Many people out there are going to tell you that you should work on your mental math skills. And we've personally found after working with tens of thousands of students across many, many, many years of doing this that that is a terrible idea for 99.9% of people.

If someone is telling you to do a lot of math in your head, that is wrong in our opinion. And it's extremely risky. Usually what they're telling you when they're telling you that is they're just telling you the way that they personally like to take the test, which is different than the best way for you personally to take the test. And that's because a lot of GMAT® instructors are just super smart and super great at standardized tests and this is what they naturally happen to be good at.

But if you're the mental math person and you have great results with mental math, great. We're never going to argue with your results. We are 100% pragmatists. If you're getting the results you want doing all the math in your head, don't stop. Keep going. We're telling you that a lot of people are going to tell you to do mental math because it's easy for them to do mental math. And for you personally — just statistically in terms of the audience consuming this content — that is probably not you. You're probably not the mental math person. And it's going to be a huge waste of time to try to get great at mental math because it's going to lead to you making a lot of mistakes on questions that you could have gotten right if you just got better at hand computation and got faster at writing out all the math.

And we know it's painful. We still have the voice in our heads when doing the quant section saying like, "You don't have time to write all this stuff down. Hurry up, we're out of time." And there's significant time pressure in the section for most people.

So we just want you to know that's a totally normal experience. And it's going to be a bit of an internal battle for most of us to continue to write down the things that we need to write down and cultivate good scratch work habits, even under the incredible time pressure that most of us face during the test. And we'll talk more about that — and how the scoring algorithm works and how you can adjust your strategy to make that a little bit easier — as we go through the episode.

But for now, you're going to hear us talk about hand computation a lot. And the reason for that is: the thing that's going to drive your quant score more than anything else, everybody, is not missing questions you know how to do.

Getting hard questions right is awesome. But that's not going to be the bread and butter of a top quant score on this exam. The bread and butter of a top quant score on this exam is going to be doing the basics really well. It's like most business situations. If you have incredible marketing and incredible ads but a terrible product and terrible fulfillment, you don't really have a great business.

Whereas if you have an incredible product with incredible word of mouth, incredible customer service, everybody who works with you loves you — you could have pretty bad marketing and your business is probably still going to grow because you have a solid foundation. You're doing the basics really, really well.

So that's a good analogy for how you want to be thinking about the quant section and your quant skills — nail the stuff you know, nail the basics really, really well and super consistently. Consistent process yields consistent results.

And you really don't want to be that person who's sometimes getting the super killer quant score and then the next test is way lower and then the next test is high and then two in a row that are low. That's a good way to drive yourself nuts. And that's very similar to a business that's purely based on slick advertising — when the ads are good, everybody's happy, and then other months when your ads are bad, you don't have any positive word of mouth. Your performance suffers.

That's how it's going to be if you don't have great solid scratch work habits and you start missing questions that you did know how to do because of computation issues. So we really just want to take the opportunity to hammer that point because a lot of people have a lot of resistance to that.

Maybe to use a sports analogy — no team ever won a championship on highlight reel plays only. Things like defense and not turning the ball over is the foundation of a championship team. Now it's great if you can have some highlight reel plays, but let's not pretend that getting super hard questions right and then missing a bunch of questions you know how to do is going to yield a great quant score. Because it's not.

You'll get much better results just cultivating good scratch work habits from the beginning.

One more thing we've talked about in a past episode but we'll reiterate here: make sure you're doing all your scratch work and your practice problems on a separate piece of paper because that's how you're going to do it on test day. The question's going to be on a computer screen and you're going to have to do all your figuring — whether you're taking the exam in person or at home — on a separate whiteboard or scratch paper. And so you want to get used to doing that because transcription — copying down the problem from the computer screen — is super, super important to this "not missing questions you know how to do" philosophy.

How to Relearn the Basic Content

Usually the best way to learn or relearn this is just a structured approach from books or courses. Like we said, we ran through the whole gamut of that in the how to start episode from a few weeks ago. That can really help you out if you're not sure where you should be beginning with this process.

Now, if you need a completely free program that's just focused on math basics, then you can check out Khan Academy. And if you want a free study plan, GMAT Club has some great free study plans that can help you structure your approach.

Having said all that, if you can invest some money into a paid program, that's usually going to help you out in terms of speed, usually.

How the Quant Section Connects to Business School

So that's the basics of what's on the Quant section and what we recommend as you're starting out. Now let's get into some higher level strategizing around what this means for business school, how you should be framing your study of the Quant section versus the other sections, and how you optimize your approach so that you can get the most efficient gains.

The individual Quant score matters to admissions officers. They are going to look at your individual Quant score when they're evaluating your candidacy for any business school, just like they're going to look at your overall score.

Right now for top 10 programs, 78 Quant or higher is great. And at that point your Quant score is generally high enough. If you're targeting top three, we would say that up to 80 or 81 helps. And then after that, it's nice to have a higher Quant score than that, but it's probably not helping in terms of making your case that you're good at Quant material. It'll help your overall score, so if you're having the easiest time driving your overall score by increasing the Quant, then great, go ahead and do it. But after 81, we think that's the point of diminishing returns. And if you could more easily increase your total score by improving your verbal or improving your Data Insights score, then we would recommend that.

So let's talk about how that works. Quant drives the overall score, and a good way to simplify this for yourself is: a one point gain on the Quant section is going to drive the overall score by 10 points.

So let's say my baseline test is a 75 Quant and a 555 on the overall score. If I just moved my Quant to 76 and didn't move my verbal or DI score at all, then my overall score would be a 565. Now, this isn't a perfect linear relationship but it's close enough that as a student you can use that to gauge what you need to do to drive your overall score improvement. And that's also true of verbal and DI by and large.

The Adaptive Algorithm

Next point to make about the Quant section — this is really important. It is going to adapt to your ability in real time. So the GMAT® is what's called a computer adaptive test. And just to break that down to the most basic elements: when you get a question right, the algorithm is going to serve you a harder question. When you get a question wrong, the algorithm is going to serve you an easier question. And it's going to use those question difficulties as you move through the section to calculate your score.

So what does that mean? That means that your score is not strictly based on accuracy, and that's a really, really important point to hammer, because pretty much every test you've taken up to this point in your life has been based on accuracy — how often you're right and how infrequently you're wrong. And now all of a sudden you're playing a totally different game where the difficulty of questions matters and where in the section you get certain questions right and wrong matters.

We're here to say this is a little more complicated. In fact, a lot more complicated than a typical test and the typical way you would evaluate your performance.

Getting easy questions wrong is going to hurt your score more than getting hard questions wrong. And the reason we're bringing that up is just to circle back briefly to what we were saying about having good scratch work habits — cultivating those from the beginning and making sure that you're not missing questions that you do know how to do.

There's going to be plenty of questions on an adaptive test that you straight up will not know how to do in the allotted time, and you're going to have to learn to let those go. It's a difficult process for most of us type A folks, but it's totally doable. And it's a good thing for your leadership ability as you progress down this path. It's a good opportunity to cultivate an investor's mindset: how do I get good at investing in the things that are working well, and how do I get good at divesting from the things that are not going to be a good opportunity?

Something new for this version of the GMAT® that has never existed before: you can now, when you get to the end of the section, go back and change your answer on up to three problems. Which is a pretty cool feature.

The best approach is: go through the section once the right way and don't be planning to go back to any of the questions. So it's kind of like you're still taking it the old way, because the best way to make a decision is make it right the first time. If you don't know what you're doing on a question, you want to become that person who can just let it go.

Think about it like playing a card game, like poker. You bet more when you have good cards and you learn to invest more in the hands when you have luck and preparation on your side. And you bet less or you fold when you don't have very good cards.

It's possible to achieve a great score even when missing a lot of questions. Most people are going to miss about 30% of questions that they see in the quant section.

The shorter exam — now that there's only 21 questions in quant rather than 31 — means there's less margin for error. And that means all the stuff we've been talking about today is even more important than it ever has been. The scratch work — more important. Not missing questions you know how to do — even more important. Giving away super hard questions because they're soaking up six minutes and making those decisions really well — even more important.

Every decision making tactic, every strategic element is now 30% at minimum more important than it's ever been because there's fewer data points to gauge your ability and so there's less margin for error.

What to Avoid

There's two main things to avoid. The number one thing is spending too much time on questions you don't know how to do. And rushing through questions you do know how to do so that you can spend more time on questions you don't know how to do.

How to Build Good Study Habits

At the biggest level — in terms of managing your overall prep from start to finish — you should be doing more individual questions early on in your prep. So for the first one to three months of preparation where you're covering all the individual topics that you need more work on, you should not be doing sets of questions at all in our opinion. You should not be doing 10 geometry in a row or 10 algebra in a row without stopping the timer. You should be doing one question, stop the timer, check your answer, then and only then move to the next question. Then stop the timer, check your answer, move to the next question.

And the reason you should be doing that early in your prep is you don't want to be doing something wrong or not correcting a mistake and then compounding doing that wrong thing for the whole rest of the set. And now you're burning in bad habits even deeper.

Once you've touched on every single topic once, then you can move to a timed set style of practice if you want to. Start with simple numbers like 10 questions — start with sets of five easy, five medium problems. Start with a count-up timer so you create some time awareness but no time pressure. Then when you're ready, move to a countdown timer like 10 questions in 20 minutes. About 2 minutes per problem is good time pressure to practice with.

Build up your difficulty level of questions you're including in the set until you can maintain a solid accuracy of around 70% in each set.

The 1-2-3 Rule of Time Management

We call this the 1-2-3 rule of time management. At the basic level, you're going to assess how a problem is going after one minute, then after two minutes, and then after three minutes. You're going to make different decisions depending on how the problem is going at one minute, two minutes, or three minutes.

First minute — the get-to-know-you phase. You're just trying to sort out: are there any massive red flags or deal breakers on this question? That's what you're trying to figure out in the first minute. Just — is there anything that is a definite no that would keep me from proceeding on this problem? Such as: I can't understand what the question is asking me. Well, that's a huge red flag. Or: can't understand what it's giving me. I don't understand the parameters of this question. That's a huge red flag.

If you're noticing that within the first minute, it's time to pick your favorite letter, pick the same letter every single time. Don't think about strategic guessing when you're doing this kind of thing — just cut time because you don't want to invest time on a question where it's probably not going to pay off.

Within that first minute, you should be collecting data on the problem, like writing down what the problem's asking you, writing down everything that you're given. Good scratch work habits. And making sure there's a reasonable odds of success on the problem.

Second minute — the second date. You want to make sure that there's some potential here. You want to be doing a good job — not messing up the relationship with some controllable things like bad scratch work or rushing through the problem. Are you making traction? Are all the assumptions you had in the first minute playing out? Is the strategy you're implementing going well?

If it's less than a 50% likelihood of paying off, stop and let it go. If it's more than 50%, you can go all the way up to three minutes.

Three minutes — bail out 100% of the time. If you get into that three to four minute range, that's one point for the price of two. And that's an investment that is just basically never going to pay off across a GMAT® section.

You can use an interval timer — just go to online-stopwatch.com and click on their interval timer. Set up a timer where there's a sound at one minute, a sound at two minutes, and a sound at three minutes. That's a great tool you can use to develop this background intuitive sense of what one minute feels like, what two minutes feels like, and what three minutes feels like.

Clock Checks and Scratch Work Tips

A lot of people ask: should I check the clock after every question? No, don't do that. You're going to end up obsessing about the timer and just freaking yourself out and wasting a bunch of time. Super simple way to track your timing in each section is check your clock every seven questions in quant and DI. It should be seven questions every 15 minutes in both of those sections. And in verbal, it's 23 questions in 45 minutes, so check the clock every eight questions.

If you're missing a lot of questions you know how to do, make sure that you start with quality scratch work or go back to auditing your scratch work. And a good benchmark is: your scratch work should be so clear that someone could tell exactly how you thought through the problem without having to talk to you. They could just look at your scratch work and see the mental logic that you went through. And if your scratch work's not that clear, then it's not good enough yet.

If you need to develop this, don't use time pressure. Stop the time pressure. Just run a count-up timer on your questions and don't use the interval timer. Don't use the 1-2-3 rule. Just let the timer run for 15 minutes if you need to until you get that great scratch work. Work on that perfect scratch work on enough questions that you just naturally start to get faster.

If you are struggling with content and the book explanations — the explanations in the official guide — then a web search can really help with that. Popping questions into a web search can really help with alternate explanations on the quant side. Bad explanations in the official guide are a big pain point for people when they're studying GMAT® quant.

As always, if you have questions, reach out any time. And our greatest hope, as always, 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 GMAT®, head to our website — theGMATStrategy.com — and check out our free 40 minute video presentation on how to achieve your dream GMAT® score in half the normal time.

In the meantime, this is a weekly show, so please subscribe and stay positive and stay consistent with your studies. We'll talk to you all soon.