GMAT Strategy

Hello again,
As follow-up to my post last week, I took another practice CAT today and scored a 630 (38 Q; 37 V). So I'm not exactly where I need to be (still lots of work to do) but wondering if 1 month will be enough time to get my score up to a 700 (at least).

For the quant section, pacing was a HUGE issue and I found myself guessing a lot at the end. Questions that I had done quickly during practice were taking me much longer and I was making silly mistakes that I had to go back and correct which caused me to waste a lot of time. So that is definitely an area I will be focusing on in the coming weeks. I was also weak on the geometry questions so I will have to review that content as well.

As for verbal, my weakest area by far was critical reasoning (especially inference/assumption questions). I had a couple of silly mistakes on RC that I am mad at myself for making. In general, SC went pretty well but more practice will definitely be helpful.

I plan to keep working through the Empower GMAT course as well as doing practice sets from the official guides.

Any tips would be welcome but any thoughts on if a 700 is possible to attain in a month?

Thank you!!!!

I have seen test scores jump up, and down, with changes in emotions, approach, psychology and, of course, skills and knowledge, some of the jumps being way more than the 70 or so points you are looking for.

I agree with Rich. Little errors are probably adding up to many missed points. Those errors are also slowing you down. For instance, if you are working on a quant question and you get halfway through only to realize you have made some little error, and you need to go back and recalculate, that process takes up a nice chunk of extra time, time that you could have used to do another problem toward the end.

As far as psychology, attitude and approach go, one thing that does not work well is "getting mad at yourself." That can actually lead to more silly mistakes. Look at it this way. What if someone else were getting all mad at you whenever you made a mistake? That could stress you out and hamper your performance. Well, you can be that someone else, the one stressing you out. Gosh you are right there watching you the entire time, ready to pounce. No wonder you are making silly mistakes.

The answer to that is to take a more encouraging attitude toward yourself, always being positive and unflappable, and tending to see things with a glass half full attitude. Take a Zen like attitude toward the test, always calm, never angry, never freaked out. The only things that matter are skill and accuracy. You don't get worked up or too excited. You just shoot for right answers. If you are not getting as many right answers as you want, then you calmly, methodically and enthusiastically figure something out.

There are some good geometry questions here. https://bellcurves.com/ The quant side of the question bank is another good tool that you could use to get your quant score higher. You just sign up for a practice account and go to the question bank. Then choose whatever category you want to work on.

On verbal, keep practicing and be super determined to see paths to right answers. I bet with an adjustment in general approach alone you could get that verbal score four or more points higher.

Also visualize your hitting your target score. The silly mistakes seem to indicate that you have some inner conflict or block related to accuracy. That's not surprising given what you said about getting angry at yourself. When one gets angry, conflict does not get resolved. Instead things get rammed through or beaten down. Of course then, when the pressure is on, the conflicts can resurface, maybe in the form of "silly mistakes." By visualizing success you can get your energy flowing in a way that may solve some of this. So visualize success and then seek to maintain calm during the next 24 hours after doing that. In other words, don't visualize success and then when any emotions come up go and kick your dog. LOL Zen masters never get angry and yet they don't repress as they are good at riding out emotional storms. That's a good way to be in order to succeed at anything, including rocking the GMAT.