Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

Hi,

1) You have mentioned nothing about how have you gone about your preparation and how do you plan ahead.

2) The number of practice tests don't really help. You need to analyze your mistakes and move ahead.

Try and post how have you gone about your preparation and then possibly people will be able to help you out!

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Please press "thanks" if you think my post has helped you.. Cheers!!

I had subscribed to the 60 day GMAT course from Beat the Gmat. I have finished the 12th edition Official Guide. I did review the mistakes I was making while solving the OG.

Going forward, I had planned to keep giving tests frequently and review mistakes until the day of the test. Its not like I am nervous and am falling short of time. I seem to have 4-5 minutes at the end of every section (Verbal and Quant). This gives me an impression that I am doing ok. But the score doesn't seem to be improving.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Did you review your wrong answers and learn what you did wrong?

Just so you know, when I first started taking practice tests, I was scoring in the low to mid 600s, which isn't much better than you. I've taken over 30 practice exams (some recycled, of course).

You can get better at the GMAT by practicing. But there is ZERO point in taking a practice exam if you don't go back to your wrong answers and figure out what you did wrong.

If after every single wrong anwswer you don't have a "ohhhhhhh, I get it now!" moment, or a "damn, I'm a fool, I should've gotten that, stupid mistake" moment, you have failed yourself in your preparation.

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has" - Margaret Mead

That's my problem exactly. I do review my answers and do smack my head for most of the wrong questions (or almost all). According to me, I seem to be putting in serious efforts. Its kinda disappointing not to see the efforts paying off.

Now I'm trying to figure out of I'm doing something wrong. Trust me, I'm not being lazy. But two tests with same score more preparation is just frustrating.

Maybe something encouraging would help?

I created this thread a few days ago. Maybe you will get some value out of it.

http://www.beatthegmat.com/attention-all-gmat-warriors-t110727.html

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has" - Margaret Mead

Thanks man.. I'll be more persistent.. I'll get back here with the score from my next test..!

What were your practice test score split up ? ?

You have far more to learn than you think. Two tests a week is too much to go for, you won't be learning anything from the tests. Identify weak topics in each section say strengthen questions in CR, modifier in SC, inequalities in quant, go through the concepts in any strategy guide whichever is best or whichever you have it with you, redo related OG problems and review them effectively until you are clear with the concept. This cannot be done in 3 days for sure. So reduce the practice tests keep it to one test a week. You are not interested in rescheduling, so stick to GMATPrep rather than other test prep mocks. You can retake GMAT Prep any number of times, but the scores will be inflated in retakes. Search for 198 GMATPrep problems for SC, quant and 108 GMATPrep CR documents, utilize those problems to learn. Improve your RC hit rate to increase your verbal score.

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Getting defeated is just a temporary notion, giving it up is what makes it permanent.
http://gmatandbeyond.blogspot.in/

I disagree. You can learn plenty from a test. There is no faster way to find your critical vulnerabilities by taking an actual test facing a time crunch. You go back and you analyze what you answered wrong until you actually get the material.

I abandoned books 2 months into my prep, because most of the questions were just too easy. The practice CATs out there are the only way you can ensure that you're getting challenged with the most difficult questions, since they adjust to your ability level. At one point, I was taking a test a day.

The score you get on it doesn't matter, especially if you've recycled them, but you practice for a game by playing in a game. You don't practice for a game with a no-pads walkthrough.

The key though is to go back and analyze your wrong answers, figure out what you did wrong, and solve them.

Practice tests are indeed useless if you fail to do that.

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has" - Margaret Mead

You are looking from the perspective of a 700 scorer. A 700 scorer will hardly have weak topics to hone and a 600 scorer will have many weak topics to work on. You can finish reviewing in a day because you have said that the problems in the books are too easy, but it is not the same case with a 600 scorer. A 600 scorer needs more time to first learn the concept, apply it on few problems and get them right. I don't think its quite easy to do all these in a single day or even 3 days with many weak topics to work on and frequent mock tests are useless unless you make a considerable progress from your previous test. I increased my quant score from 43 to 49 by working on inequalities, work rate, geometry pblms and it took me a week to learn the concepts from MGMAT, solve related OG problems, review them and then again apply them in practice tests. Solving the problems in practice test wouldn't have helped me by any means, I would have known only the solution to that particular problem or the formula, tricks involved but no way I could solve another problem which involves same topic. That may work for people who are already good with the basics but not for beginners. Same is the case with verbal and believe me it takes more time for a non native speaker to improve verbal part.

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Getting defeated is just a temporary notion, giving it up is what makes it permanent.
http://gmatandbeyond.blogspot.in/

Definitely not trying to instigate an argument with you brother, but my philisophy is - you train how you fight.

I think most people will get lulled into a false sense of security by GMAT books because they can solve the problems with an unlimited amount of time, and the questions are generally not of higher difficulty. For me personally, I really struggle with the complex terminlogy and strategies that the books try to teach. I formulate my own and use my own.

If there's a problem that I'm constantly struggling to solve (for me, it's usually combinatorics), I can attack those aggressively until I familiarize myself with them and develop my own course of action on how to solve them.

I'll be honest though, with the books on the market, I struggled to find ones with sufficiently challenging combinatoric problems in sufficienct quantities. That's why I trained with practice tests. As soon as they adjust to your ability level, your mind is constantly challenged with tough problems and curve balls, and tougher combinatoric problems are more likely to emerge.

The first GMAT CAT I ever took was from a Peterson's book. I scored something like 610. For the two months before game day, I completely abandoned books and was taking 4-5 CATs a week. When I wasn't taking a CAT, I was reviewing my old CATs and solving the questions I got wrong (again).

Some books are really good though. I credit Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction for single handedly boosting my verbal from the mid 30's to the low 40's.

I will caveat with this - my strategy is for native speakers. As someone who was raised in one English speaking country or another for most of my life, I have an inherent advantage with verbal. For a non-native speaker, verbal will probably be a much more significant challenge than what I experienced.

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has" - Margaret Mead