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Hi Guys

After much contemplation and a feeling of having exhausted all my options I'm posting here in the hope of getting some good suggestions.

Background: I have taken the GMAT twice so far. May 2014 and Oct 2014. The first time I took it after a few months of self study. Score: 580. Following that I enrolled for Manhattan Gmat online courses. Although I followed the course diligently, my second attempt was a disaster. Work had been crazy a month before my GMAT and the pressure was starting to get to me (at that time I was very keen on applying for R2, 2014). On the test day I was extremely nervous and that was reflected in my score. 530! (35Q, 28V). My practice scores had been a roller coaster of results, ranging from 580 to 640.

After this I decided to take sometime off work and concentrate solely on the GMAT for two months. I decided to push my applications to 2015. But I still wanted to beat the GMAT while I was still in the zone. I've taken Nov and Dec off work. So I restarted my prep. I started doing timed and untimed sets of 20 questions each for Q and V. I maintained error logs and made note of areas where I tend to go wrong. My math weaknesses seem to be WP, Probability and timing overall. For verbal I tend to get almost the same number of questions wrong in SC, CR and RC. But my areas of weakness seem to be Parallelism and Comparisons, Weaken Questions on CR and inference questions on RC. My timing is not great and I tend to have just about enough time to finish.

Having identified these I seem to have difficulty in developing a strategy on how to improve in these areas. I've tried working out problems specific to these areas but that doesn't seem to help much. I have taken three MGMAT CATS over the past month and my scores have been 640(42Q, 35V), 620(40Q, 35V), 620(39Q, 35V). As you can see my split has been almost the exact same. :/ I still have a month of leave to focus solely on this so I hope I can improve my score in the coming weeks. The final goal is a 680+ score. I am really trying to keep myself motivated despite the lack of results, so hopefully someone here will be able to shed some light on what I am doing wrong.

Materials I have been using include MGMAT guides, OG Guide 2013 and the official Q & V review.

Thanks

For more good quant questions try the BellCurves question bank, literally thousands of cool quant questions (Their verbal is not at all as good.), even if some have errors in the answer or explanation, and the Veritas question bank and practice CATs. Both question banks are online and you can play them almost as you would video games.

Myself, to improve my probability skills, in addition to using the above mentioned question banks, I did online searches for marble questions, coin flip questions, and other types of probability questions.

Beyond that, one thing I discovered is that where I thought I was only weak in a few areas, actually those were just my weakest areas, and I had much room for improvement in many other areas. For instance, while I was nearly clueless regarding permutations, I found that meanwhile I was not that great at quickly doing algebra focused problems, or sequence problems, or groups problems. In fact when I took the real test, I got stuck forever on a groups problem. I just hadn't really thought to work on that type much and so I wasn't ready when a tougher question of that type showed up.

So maybe you have some of that going on too. Maybe you too are allowing your weakest areas to obscure your room for improvement areas.

By improving in all areas of quant, you will improve your timing.

I don't have as much to add about verbal. I suspect someone else will chime in regarding that.

In general, I encourage you to be confident. Truth of the matter is that with enough work you could score 800 on this test. It's just a matter of keeping at it. Also, keep looking for angles. As you implied, if your score is not improving, it just means you haven't figured out what you need to do to improve it.

With that in mind, I'll add that psychology is a huge factor in any endeavor. If you are angry or fearful, or if like me you decided to hate algebra for some random reason when you were like twelve years old, that can get in the way of success without your being aware of it. In one case a girl I was tutoring was struggling with math. I kinda wondered if maybe she was like afraid to be good at it or somehow against being good at it. Sure enough, after a conversation about what she might have against being good at math, she suddenly started getting it, asking great questions, things like that. Total change. So there is something else to consider. Gotta be zen, no fear, allow it to flow, things like that.

So be confident, enjoy the journey, and play this test as if it's a video game.

Hi Marty

Thanks for the quick response. I hadn't actually thought of it that way. I have been solely trying to focus on my most weak areas over the past few weeks. But it is true that when it comes down to solving problems in under 2 minutes, I tend to get problems wrong even from areas I thought I was comfortable with. Will look into that asap and see how I can improve on other areas as well. I did a quick search for the BellCurves question bank, couldn't find it. Do I need to sign up with them to get access?

Hoping someone out there can give me a few pointers on verbal as well. :/

Yes, to get the BellCurves question bank you need to create an account. I am not sure what level of account gives one access to all the questions. You could sign up for the free BellCurves account and see what you get.

Also, regarding getting wrong answers on ones with which you are comfortable, while to a degree this test is about understanding concepts and knowing how to get to answers, the score is about how many problems you get right. So that aspect, getting them right, is actually another area on which to focus.

For one thing, some problems have almost no obvious complexity, can be simply built around positive and negative numbers, some basic algebra or maybe just a mean and median, and they still can rock you. Have to figure out how to get 'em right.

Wow! I just signed up for the free account and it looks promising. Lots of practice problems. Thanks for that. In terms of the score depending on how many I get right, how much of an impact will the level of questions have? Meaning if I get more 500+ questions wrong and a few 700+ right will that hurt my score more?

rvc27 wrote:Wow! I just signed up for the free account and it looks promising. Lots of practice problems. Thanks for that. In terms of the score depending on how many I get right, how much of an impact will the level of questions have? Meaning if I get more 500+ questions wrong and a few 700+ right will that hurt my score more?

If you are asking what I think you are asking, I am pretty sure the level has a significant impact. At the same time, I am not that good with the scoring algorithm at this point. Maybe you can find more about that elsewhere.

To give you some reference, on the BellCurves quant questions, I was working up to scoring scoring around 75 percent correct in the average quant category. Some of that was because I was right and they were wrong. So maybe with practice I was actually getting closer to 80 percent average right. That was on a somewhat timed basis. My average time is over three minutes per question. That includes questions on which I spent over 20 minutes, rather than give up, and finally got the answers. I can be pretty stubborn. On GMAC CATs I tended to score between 49 and 51 on quant, and on the actual test I scored 49.

Their quant is a great video game.

On GMAC tests, practice and real, I score 49 to 51 on verbal, and on BellCurves verbal, I was under 60 percent. The upshot of this is that while you can learn from their verbal questions, that section needs work, editing.

You might also want to consider Magoosh. They offer a free one week trial - https://gmat.magoosh.com/subscribe/1-week.

Good luck,