GMAT Strategy

800_or_bust wrote:Well, I decided to take GMAT Prep Exam #1 today instead of tomorrow. And it went surprisingly well. The official GMAT practice exam seemed much easier than the non-GMAC practice exams I have taken. And pretty much confirmed the result of the 800score.com exam. The quant seemed surprisingly easy - breezed through most of it. Same with verbal. I even managed an 8 on IR with no preparation at all. Is this really what the actual GMAT is like? Maybe I've given myself way too much prep time, and should consider bumping my test date up?

800_or_bust wrote:I was going to take the full exam with the essay and IR, but I decided against it. I know Rich and some others are big on getting the full experience, but I haven't even touched the essay or IR yet. So it seems like a waste of time. I'm a really good essayist, so I assume that won't be any problem.

DavidG@VeritasPrep wrote:

800_or_bust wrote:Well, I decided to take GMAT Prep Exam #1 today instead of tomorrow. And it went surprisingly well. The official GMAT practice exam seemed much easier than the non-GMAC practice exams I have taken. And pretty much confirmed the result of the 800score.com exam. The quant seemed surprisingly easy - breezed through most of it. Same with verbal. I even managed an 8 on IR with no preparation at all. Is this really what the actual GMAT is like? Maybe I've given myself way too much prep time, and should consider bumping my test date up?

Obviously everyone is different, but having had a student recently who was scoring very similarly on his Veritas practice tests to how you've been scoring (and similarly on his official practice tests to how you've been scoring) I say go for it if there are dates open. (This student ended up with a 770 on test day.) I'd be very surprised if you see a result that isn't 750+.

800_or_bust wrote:

DavidG@VeritasPrep wrote:

800_or_bust wrote:Well, I decided to take GMAT Prep Exam #1 today instead of tomorrow. And it went surprisingly well. The official GMAT practice exam seemed much easier than the non-GMAC practice exams I have taken. And pretty much confirmed the result of the 800score.com exam. The quant seemed surprisingly easy - breezed through most of it. Same with verbal. I even managed an 8 on IR with no preparation at all. Is this really what the actual GMAT is like? Maybe I've given myself way too much prep time, and should consider bumping my test date up?

Obviously everyone is different, but having had a student recently who was scoring very similarly on his Veritas practice tests to how you've been scoring (and similarly on his official practice tests to how you've been scoring) I say go for it if there are dates open. (This student ended up with a 770 on test day.) I'd be very surprised if you see a result that isn't 750+.

Thought I had posted a reply earlier, but I guess I failed to hit submit. I just wanted to say for me, personally, I have a tendency to underperform on test day based on my performance on other standardized tests. I mean, don't get me wrong, I usually score very high notwithstanding - I just mean relative to my performance on official practice exams. So I won't feel really comfortable until I hit 800 a couple times.

Also I'm having surgery later this summer, so I deliberately scheduled it far in advance so I'd be completely healed by test day. I suppose I could move it up prior to that, but I've got a lot of other things going on this summer as well. I suppose I could give it another 3, 4 weeks of intensive studies and see where I'm at then.

I'd like to scout out the test center prior to test day so I know exactly where it's at and also to have a better idea of the temperature, noise level, layout, etc. Would the Pearson folks mind if I stopped in a couple weeks before the test? I just don't want any unexpected surprises, i.e. a thermostat set on 65 when I'm in shorts & a t-shirt. I know the last standardized test I took, the first go-around was at a local college during the wintertime. Apparently, they either shut off the heat completely or turned it way down to save energy over the weekend. It was at most 60 degrees in there.

800_or_bust wrote:Also I'm having surgery later this summer, so I deliberately scheduled it far in advance so I'd be completely healed by test day.

I'd like to scout out the test center prior to test day so I know exactly where it's at and also to have a better idea of the temperature, noise level, layout, etc. Would the Pearson folks mind if I stopped in a couple weeks before the test? I just don't want any unexpected surprises, i.e. a thermostat set on 65 when I'm in shorts & a t-shirt.

Thought I had posted a reply earlier, but I guess I failed to hit submit. I just wanted to say for me, personally, I have a tendency to underperform on test day based on my performance on other standardized tests.

DavidG@VeritasPrep wrote:

800_or_bust wrote:Well, I decided to take GMAT Prep Exam #1 today instead of tomorrow. And it went surprisingly well. The official GMAT practice exam seemed much easier than the non-GMAC practice exams I have taken. And pretty much confirmed the result of the 800score.com exam. The quant seemed surprisingly easy - breezed through most of it. Same with verbal. I even managed an 8 on IR with no preparation at all. Is this really what the actual GMAT is like? Maybe I've given myself way too much prep time, and should consider bumping my test date up?

Obviously everyone is different, but having had a student recently who was scoring very similarly on his Veritas practice tests to how you've been scoring (and similarly on his official practice tests to how you've been scoring) I say go for it if there are dates open. (This student ended up with a 770 on test day.) I'd be very surprised if you see a result that isn't 750+.

800_or_bust wrote:

DavidG@VeritasPrep wrote:

800_or_bust wrote:Well, I decided to take GMAT Prep Exam #1 today instead of tomorrow. And it went surprisingly well. The official GMAT practice exam seemed much easier than the non-GMAC practice exams I have taken. And pretty much confirmed the result of the 800score.com exam. The quant seemed surprisingly easy - breezed through most of it. Same with verbal. I even managed an 8 on IR with no preparation at all. Is this really what the actual GMAT is like? Maybe I've given myself way too much prep time, and should consider bumping my test date up?

Obviously everyone is different, but having had a student recently who was scoring very similarly on his Veritas practice tests to how you've been scoring (and similarly on his official practice tests to how you've been scoring) I say go for it if there are dates open. (This student ended up with a 770 on test day.) I'd be very surprised if you see a result that isn't 750+.

Quick question for you... Are the Veritas Prep exams typically more difficult than the actual GMAT - at least for Quant? I just took the Quant portion of Exam 5 - holy cow! My brain hurts after that... Brutal. I managed a 49Q, which was the highest I've gotten on a Veritas Prep exam. Previous high was 47Q on 4/24. This was crazy though - I don't even know how I managed to score a 49... Ran out of time for the last 5 questions, and only got 20 of the 32 that I had answered correct. I think I was wasting too much time trying to hack away at answers, but I can't believe the score was as high as it was.

800_or_bust wrote:Definitely going to bump my test date up, probably reschedule for early July. Took GMAT Prep Exam #2 for the first time Sunday and got a 770 (50Q/47V). Was kind of disappointed with the verbal score - I only missed one question, and still only managed a scaled score of 47. Not sure why - it was a difficult SC question around #22 or 23. So you would think I would have gotten at least a 50. Still want to give myself enough time to get up to an 800 level. Only way to guarantee an 800 is to never miss, and I'm still not there yet.

Marty Murray wrote:

800_or_bust wrote:Definitely going to bump my test date up, probably reschedule for early July. Took GMAT Prep Exam #2 for the first time Sunday and got a 770 (50Q/47V). Was kind of disappointed with the verbal score - I only missed one question, and still only managed a scaled score of 47. Not sure why - it was a difficult SC question around #22 or 23. So you would think I would have gotten at least a 50. Still want to give myself enough time to get up to an 800 level. Only way to guarantee an 800 is to never miss, and I'm still not there yet.

You can miss a quant question or two and still score 800, but maybe you have to get all of the verbal questions right.

I am surprised that one verbal question missed took you down to V47. I scored V50 once on the real thing. So I must have missed at least one, and yet I didn't get dinged that hard.

You have to be soooo careful and determined in order to get all of the verbal questions right. I found that slacking off even a little was doom.

Go over your quant section and figure out what tripped you up and make sure you know how to do those kinds of questions forwards, backwards and upside down. That BellCurves question bank could help you with doing that.

Once you have covered everything, Q51 is not such a big deal. You just have to get good at handling every type of quant question. Then to get V51 you have to be in the zone.

One thing I noticed in CR recently is that sometimes the right answer is not such a great answer. I mean some CR questions are way cool, and some are kind of stupid, and the stupid ones can be the ones that trip you up. The right answer is the one that somehow makes some kind of stupid sense, and the other answers can be eliminated somehow. LOL. So maybe that insight will help you too.

SC can be a bit of an art. You have to be so perceptive to get some of the most difficult ones right.The last time I took the test, I almost blew scoring 800 by choosing the wrong answer to a SC question, and then somehow I noticed that my answer was not the best one and changed it to the right one.

I think there is an element of being something along the lines of psychic, and also if you unconsciously want to sabotage your score you just might. Apparently I had decided on both a conscious level and an unconscious level to score 800 that time.

You might get some ideas from this. https://healingchronicles.com/2014/01/0 ... n-to-heal/

800_or_bust wrote:I see debriefings on the web of folks who scored V48, 49 or 50. So clearly it is possible to achieve any one of those scores. Makes me wonder if the GMAT Prep Exams just don't have a large enough database of the very hardest verbal questions in order to differentiate above a 47, and hence the large ding for just a single miss. You would think, in theory, the way I missed would be the best from the CAT's scoring perspective - rattled off a long string of correct answers to begin the exam, then ended on a long string of correct answers.