I'm applying to RSM MSc programs and the admission test has me more nervous than I expected. I graduated with a 3.4 GPA in economics but it's been 3 years since I did any serious quant work. Four weeks in at 2 hours a day and I'm sitting at 65% on quantitative practice problems. Verbal I'm less worried about, but data interpretation under time pressure is a different story.
My accuracy on algebra and geometry questions is around 72%, but it drops to 55% on data interpretation specifically. Reading a chart and doing quick mental math simultaneously is harder than I remembered. I've started timing each question block strictly to break the habit of sitting on hard ones.
Five weeks left before my test date. The plan is 2 weeks on quantitative fundamentals, then 3 weeks of full timed practice tests. I keep hearing the time pressure is brutal — can anyone who's recently taken it confirm how tight it actually is?
I scored in the 78th percentile and got into my first-choice program. Practice reading graphs in under 20 seconds before you even look at the answer choices — that habit made a bigger difference than any content review I did.
The verbal section is shorter than the official guide implies and the math is heavier. I'd weight your remaining study time 60% quantitative and 40% everything else, not evenly.
Five weeks is more than enough. I only had 3 weeks and passed. Ratios, percentages, and basic descriptive statistics covered about 60% of the quant questions on my exam — you don't need advanced material.
The time pressure is real. I finished with maybe 3 minutes to spare and I'm usually a fast test-taker. Don't spend more than 90 seconds on any single question — the harder ones cluster near the end and you need time for those.
Honestly the math isn't as bad as people make it out to be, but 65% after four weeks tells me you're probably losing points on data interpretation and not pure algebra. That was my problem too. I kept drilling equations when the actual test wants you to read a table or chart fast and not overthink it. One thing that actually helped me was doing timed problem sets with a hard cutoff, like two minutes per question, no exceptions, because sitting with a problem too long is what kills your score.
Also random but I noticed when I was studying for a completely different cert, the api 653 inspection planning practice material had some really well-structured timed quant drills that I used just for the pacing practice, not the content. The RSM test isn't brutal if you've locked in your timing. Four weeks is enough, you're not behind.
Honestly, the API 653 stuff caught me off guard too when I was prepping for a similar technical exam. Failed my first attempt because I was just grinding practice questions without actually understanding where my gaps were. Second time I went back to basics for two weeks, focused on the specific formulas I kept getting wrong, and drilled those until they felt automatic. The math itself isn't impossibly hard but it's easy to freeze when you haven't done it in a while.
At 65% you're not that far off, but four weeks is enough time to close that gap if you stop doing random practice and start being strategic about it. Figure out which question types are eating you alive and fix those first. I also found that doing problems under timed conditions made a huge difference, because I wasn't running out of time on the actual test, I was running out of confidence. Good luck, you've got this.