GMAT Strategy

Hi Everyone,

I've been actively looking at these forums and I wanted advice from those who have mastered the GMAT. I've taken the GMAT twice and I have not been able to score higher than a 600. I think a lot of this has to do with the way I've approached the study material and being slightly overwhelmed with what's available.

I currently have access to the following resources:
- MGMAT books 4th edition
- Veritas prep and one class retake
- Magoosh
- ALL of the OG material (including online and test bank questions in addition to the books)

My last GMAT score was a 590 (42Q/29V). I have a long way to go and I'm aiming for the 700 range. I know it's doable, but it's just a matter of actually organizing myself.

Background - I took the Veritas prep course back in April 2014 and also hired a private tutor afterwards to focus on weaknesses. I've completed a wide variety of GMAC tests and MGMAT tests.

Please advise on retake strategies for both quant and verbal.

Hi Kks,

It seems that you had hit two nails and you weren't very successful. Now lets hit the 3rd one very hard. For that you just need to change your way in dealing the GMAT questions. Remember that there could be various reasons for not being able to hit your target score of 700+. You may not have managed your time well and of course you will hit the brick wall. Therefore pacing is very important. You may have solved questions while practicing for GMAT. Test taking strategies vary from just solving a problem. When you get stuck in a question(lets say a hard question/a topic you hate the most), you shouldn't be wasting your time, just do educated guess and keep moving. Don't be adamant in solving that ONE question which could even be EXPERIMENTAL.

Let us know if you would have any other specific question and we would be happy to guide.

www.manyagroup.com

Hi kks.

You talk about being overwhelmed by study materials, and actually that may give me a clue as to what you can do to improve.

This GMAT is not really a test of knowledge as much as it is a test of skill in approaching problems.

When I hear someone talk about being overwhelmed by materials, therefore, I wonder if that person is working on learning "stuff" rather than focusing on getting better at solving problems and seeing the materials merely as a tool for that.

For instance, one could either decide to learn all the strategies for solving exponent problems, or, one could work on solving exponent problems and use the materials as a resource for building one's approaches to doing so. In the first case, the person could become overwhelmed with stuff. In the second, the person would tend to only consider stuff when it helps improve skill.

The latter approach has been my approach and it has worked well.

I figured out what types of questions are on the test, as I suspect you have. Then I assessed my skill in finding the answers to each type, partly by doing practice tests and problem sets. Then for each area in which I felt I could be more skilled, pretty much all of them, I either just developed skill by doing more questions, or read up on approaches and thus learned faster than I would have by reinventing the wheel. The thing is that everything is driven less by what someone says I need to learn, a bunch of stuff, and more by my assessment of what skills I need to quickly answer the types of questions I suspect will appear on the GMAT.

As this process of assessing skills and developing stronger skills continues, one's score naturally goes up, as you realize.

Regarding the sections, here are some thoughts.

In preparing for quant, I take the attitude that I understand the concepts that are necessary for solving pretty much any question. If I had all day, or a month in some cases, I could figure out the answer, in nearly all cases. So almost every time I see a problem I go at it until I solve it. On the test I won't get points by giving up and asking for an explanation and so I seek to not do that when practicing either. Having said that, if I really get stumped, I still might not give up and go to the explanation. I might leave the question until the next day, and keep at it, or, rather than looking at the answer to that specific question, I go to the materials to see if I can find a strategy for solving the problem. That way I am still approximating the approach I will use when taking the actual test, which is to do my utmost to figure out how to use the resources I have, whatever they may be, to solve the problem. Sure, occasionally I will just go to the explanation, but that is the exception. In any case, my general attitude is that given enough time I could solve the problems, even if I had to invent math myself. I just need to learn what I need to in order to speed up the problem solving process so that I can answer enough questions in 75 minutes to achieve my target score.

So as I said, my approach is assessment of skill driven, rather than materials driven.

You can learn more about my quant score increasing strategy by reading this. https://www.beatthegmat.com/780-debrief- ... 80962.html

While a good approach to increasing one's verbal score might be a little different from one for quant, it still would have similarities.

In verbal there are a few basic rules such as parallelism, placement of modifiers, and subject verb agreement that cover a significant part of sentence correction. So in this case, learning some stuff can be pretty useful.

At the same time, much of SC is about just doggedly seeking to find flaws in structure and using them to eliminate answer choices. Is it clear what a modifier is modifying? Do you need rules to figure that out? Not really. Anyone could say like "I am not sure what this means." or "This is much clearer."

As for critical reasoning, when doing questions, I don't take notes and don't worry too much about methodology. I just look for things like premises and conclusions, and see what is going on and use logic to answer the questions. The one really important thing I learned from reading up some is that on an inference question, the inference must be necessarily true given the information in the prompt. That was definitely helpful. In general though, CR is way light on needing to know "stuff" and way more about being good with catching details and applying logic.

RC is similarly about details and logic, and about assessing situations. My approach to improving on RC was mostly to just do some Veritas practice questions until I stopped getting smoked by my missing some detail or something. I did read up a little on RC strategy at some point, after doing some problems, and with my experience in doing problems I was able to see the value of the things I was learning about when reading up on strategy.

So there are some ideas anyway.

Hi kks,

As you prep for to retake the exam, just remember to practice ALL parts of the exam. Focus on your weaknesses, but hone your strengths too. Also,
take several simulation tests in real conditions and at roughly the same hour of day. On exam day, do exactly what brought you success on sim tests.

Lastly, work on your time management. This is a key factor on the GMAT.

Best of luck!

Jessica