1st time: 570, 2nd time: 600... help?

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1st time: 570, 2nd time: 600... help?

by Seagull84 » Fri Apr 29, 2011 5:02 pm
First test (December): 570 (41Q, 29V)
Took Manhattan GMAT class, studied on and off for a year, missed the last Quant problem and the last 4 Verbal problems; clearly I needed to eat/sleep/breathe the GMAT.

Second test (today): 600 (34Q, 38V)
Took the day off before the test to relax, ate plenty of brain-powering foods the day before, day of, and during the breaks of the test. Missed no problems, noticed I was blazing through Verbal and slowed myself down about half-way through.

Target score: 650
I'm not as intelligent as the rest of you >700 scoring GMAT destroyers are, so I never planned to get above a 670, but I'm downright infuriated at myself for doing this poorly. I've wasted countless hours of my life over the last 2 years, and $2000 only to raise my score 30 points...

Details of studying during last 2.5 months
First two weeks: OG 11
1) Focused on Sentence Correction for the first two weeks
2) 1-2 hours per day
3) Wrote notecards for every rule I missed
OG 12
1) Downloaded OG-12 error log
2) Calculated number of questions to finish from all five sections by a week before the test
3) Studied 1-2 hours in the morning before work, another 1-2 hours in the evening after work
4) Timed myself on every problem appropriately
5) Marked any problems I wasn't 100% confident about after finishing them
6) Made notecards on the question type/equation/rule for any problem I got wrong or wasn't 100% confident for in my answer
7) Finished OG-12 a week before the test
8) Took two practice tests the last couple weekends
9) Final week: Reviewed all notecards until 100% memorized, went through problems I got wrong a second time during the final week, pulled out Manhattan GMAT guides for problems I still wasn't getting right

Took two GMATPrep tests the last couple weekends, so now I've used up my best practice tests. I need suggestions for which practice tests to take next?
GMATPrep 1 2 weeks ago: 630 (41Q, 35V)
GMATPrep 2 1 week ago: 630 (38Q, 38V)


At this point, I don't know what to do. When I took the test today, there were problems in Quant I have no recollection of ever being presented with in the past. I've been through the entire 11th edition Quant, 12th edition mixed, and all the Manhattan Guides (twice). I've memorized equations for problem-types I never even saw on the test today. Not one mixed-dilution scenario, not one probability question, no combinatorics, nothing that I've historically done poorly on and made massive improvements in.

I kept seeing really easy questions in Quant, and yet I kept getting them wrong because I had no idea how to solve them. I got every problem done in enough time, but I simply didn't feel like I really knew the answers to any of them. But now, I look at some of my guide problems and I feel like I know how to solve all of them.

I passed my strategy by everyone I know who's studied and taken it, I asked people on here what they thought about it, and everyone has been confident I could have scored far better than I did.

I don't know what the next step is... This is a nightmare I simply can't wake up from. I've been studying forever, talking about it with people forever, planning to get an MBA forever, and it seems no matter how much I've focused on it, it hasn't done any good at all.

I've scheduled my third test exactly a month from now, so I need to wrap my head around what I need to do to score a 650.

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by ronin » Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:54 pm
hey, don't get too bogged down. if you get your quant score from your 1st test and maintain your verbal score from your 2nd test you will easily acheive your target score. you have done it before, so you can do it again. to improve your quant i would suggest that you retake the GMAT Prep tests a lot of times. you will see a lot of new questions everytime you retake the test. Also solve the 198 GMAT Prep question set and the 300 BTG question set available in this forum. that would be enough practice for quant. And every time you find a question you can't solve, go to the MGMAT guides are refer the concepts. quant is all about practice. you can do it.

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by Seagull84 » Sat Apr 30, 2011 8:54 pm
Thanks for the advice, I downloaded the 198 and 300. I hope this isn't just another waste of a month >.<