GMAT Strategy

Yes, those mock tests can be quite the reality check, and quite the training tool.

It's a bit of a challenge for me to say how much longer you will need. From what I can tell from what I have heard, it sounds as if you have gone over the concepts and done some questions. Now maybe you need to do more questions and get some practice and identify what it is you have to do to get more right and do them faster. Getting to your score goal could take a couple more months or longer.

This is not a test to see if you have done the reading. So just reading and understanding everything someone at MGMAT has to say is probably not going to get you all the way to your goal. This is a test of skill in arriving at solutions, and much of the time developing that skill takes practice.

So I suggest doing more question bank questions, sometimes on a strictly timed basis and sometimes just noticing the time without necessarily adhering to 2 minutes per quant question or 1.8 per verbal question.

If you want another question bank that is good, but really only for quant, open a BellCurves practice account. while not all of the questions are exactly like GMAT questions, there are plenty of nice tricky quant questions there and you can see your results and the time per question. I learned much by playing that question bank like a video game. Score, score, score, blow up, score, blow up, score, score. I started by just aiming to get the right answer. Then I raised the bar by aiming to find the right answer in under two minutes. That tightened me up for sure.

We all go through things that are to some degree similar. I wrote about how I dealt with them here. https://www.beatthegmat.com/780-debrief- ... tml#735376

Marty Murray wrote:Yes, those mock tests can be quite the reality check, and quite the training tool.

It's a bit of a challenge for me to say how much longer you will need. From what I can tell from what I have heard, it sounds as if you have gone over the concepts and done some questions. Now maybe you need to do more questions and get some practice and identify what it is you have to do to get more right and do them faster. Getting to your score goal could take a couple more months or longer.

This is not a test to see if you have done the reading. So just reading and understanding everything someone at MGMAT has to say is probably not going to get you all the way to your goal. This is a test of skill in arriving at solutions, and much of the time developing that skill takes practice.

So I suggest doing more question bank questions, sometimes on a strictly timed basis and sometimes just noticing the time without necessarily adhering to 2 minutes per quant question or 1.8 per verbal question.

If you want another question bank that is good, but really only for quant, open a BellCurves practice account. while not all of the questions are exactly like GMAT questions, there are plenty of nice tricky quant questions there and you can see your results and the time per question. I learned much by playing that question bank like a video game. Score, score, score, blow up, score, blow up, score, score. I started by just aiming to get the right answer. Then I raised the bar by aiming to find the right answer in under two minutes. That tightened me up for sure.

We all go through things that are to some degree similar. I wrote about how I dealt with them here. https://www.beatthegmat.com/780-debrief- ... tml#735376

Hi Marty,

I can't thank you enough for suggesting the Bell Curves Q bank. I see that the questions really help to solidify concepts.
How similar are these Qs to Qs on the real GMAT you think..?
Also, how did you fit in mocks with the Qbank practise..?
And another thing I wanted to ask you is about the Verbal Qbank-Did that help you..?I thought it wasn't a bad idea to go through these as well.
I've pushed the date to April 11 now and really plan on practising the Qbank and taking mocks only during this period.

Thanks much!

I can't thank you enough for suggesting the Bell Curves Q bank. I see that the questions really help to solidify concepts.
How similar are these Qs to Qs on the real GMAT you think..?
Also, how did you fit in mocks with the Qbank practise..?
And another thing I wanted to ask you is about the Verbal Qbank-Did that help you..?I thought it wasn't a bad idea to go through these as well.

The questions in the BellCurves quant question bank are a mixed bag. Some of them are much like official questions. Some are not really. What they do tend to be is tricky in ways that really prepare you to get official questions right. Also, for more insight and other takes on the test, you could use other resources too.

As far as the verbal questions in that bank go, I found that they need a lot of editing. You can learn from them, maybe especially from the CR questions, but they need work, maybe especially in SC. I find that some of the SC questions and explanations are even misleading.

There are other sources of verbal questions, such as the Veritas question bank, which tend to contain tighter questions. In general though, one has to be careful with verbal questions from all test prep companies. I have found that because of the nature of creating verbal questions, test prep companies often put out verbal questions that are somehow flawed. Even GMAC puts out some flawed verbal questions.

I tend to take a mock test every week or two, partly to see how my skill development is progressing and partly for the time pressure and difficult questions. Then I look over my results to get insight into what I should work on more. The official CATs from GMAC, in both GMAT Prep and PowerPrep, are the best for this, with CATs from major companies such as Veritas and MGMAT being pretty good too.

I also do little research projects to get deeper into certain topics. For instance, I recently realized that I don't really have my quantity words clear. So I have been using both GMAT related and non GMAT related resources to get that tight. When an overlapping groups problem on a CAT took me like seven minutes to complete, I found out all about those and did a bunch of overlapping groups questions.

Marty Murray wrote:

I can't thank you enough for suggesting the Bell Curves Q bank. I see that the questions really help to solidify concepts.
How similar are these Qs to Qs on the real GMAT you think..?
Also, how did you fit in mocks with the Qbank practise..?
And another thing I wanted to ask you is about the Verbal Qbank-Did that help you..?I thought it wasn't a bad idea to go through these as well.

The questions in the BellCurves quant question bank are a mixed bag. Some of them are much like official questions. Some are not really. What they do tend to be is tricky in ways that really prepare you to get official questions right. Also, for more insight and other takes on the test, you could use other resources too.

As far as the verbal questions in that bank go, I found that they need a lot of editing. You can learn from them, maybe especially from the CR questions, but they need work, maybe especially in SC. I find that some of the SC questions and explanations are even misleading.

There are other sources of verbal questions, such as the Veritas question bank, which tend to contain tighter questions. In general though, one has to be careful with verbal questions from all test prep companies. I have found that because of the nature of creating verbal questions, test prep companies often put out verbal questions that are somehow flawed. Even GMAC puts out some flawed verbal questions.

I tend to take a mock test every week or two, partly to see how my skill development is progressing and partly for the time pressure and difficult questions. Then I look over my results to get insight into what I should work on more. The official CATs from GMAC, in both GMAT Prep and PowerPrep, are the best for this, with CATs from major companies such as Veritas and MGMAT being pretty good too.

I also do little research projects to get deeper into certain topics. For instance, I recently realized that I don't really have my quantity words clear. So I have been using both GMAT related and non GMAT related resources to get that tight. When an overlapping groups problem on a CAT took me like seven minutes to complete, I found out all about those and did a bunch of overlapping groups questions.

Hi Marty,
Sorry to bother you so much. But I took another mock without the IR and AWA-This was a Veritas mock and I scored a 660(Q46, V35).
I think my timing on this test was way better than it was on GMAT Prep mock-1.
I need to tune my quant score to a 50 and verbal to at least 40.
I see that RC hassles me quite a bit and i think i need to work on this.
Do you think the Veritas score is a good indicator of GMAT scores..?
Also, I see that their question bank is much tougher than the test and was wondering if others are also of the same opinion.

Awaiting a reply to this post and much thanks as always!!

Regards,
Mallika

The Veritas practice CATs tend to be good indicators of what one's actual GMAT score would be.

Regarding the Veritas question bank questions being more difficult than actual test questions, the Veritas questions may in some cases be a little more difficult, or much more difficult, than most official questions, but remember that as you get more right answers the test will be serving you more difficult questions than you have been getting.

As far as RC goes, I used to get "hassled" by that too until I learned to really notice details and logic and to NOT MAKE UP ANSWERS THAT THE GMAT IS TRYING TO TRICK ME INTO MAKING UP. It's funny how one can become convinced that the passage said something it did not say.

Marty Murray wrote:The Veritas practice CATs tend to be good indicators of what one's actual GMAT score would be.

Regarding the Veritas question bank questions being more difficult than actual test questions, the Veritas questions may in some cases be a little more difficult, or much more difficult, than most official questions, but remember that as you get more right answers the test will be serving you more difficult questions than you have been getting.

As far as RC goes, I used to get "hassled" by that too until I learned to really notice details and logic and to NOT MAKE UP ANSWERS THAT THE GMAT IS TRYING TO TRICK ME INTO MAKING UP. It's funny how one can become convinced that the passage said something it did not say.

Hi Marty,

I took another Manhattan mock last week and scored 530[Q36, V27]- Of course I used the pause feature every now and then.
What i don't understand is how the scores vary over Veritas and Manhattan mocks.
I scored a 660 in Veritas, but 530 in Manhattan.
I must say I found the quant on MGMAT much much tuffer than that on Veritas.
I am very confused at this stage and the D-day is exactly a month from now!

Regards,
Mallika

Hi Marty,

I took another Manhattan mock last week and scored 530[Q36, V27]- Of course I used the pause feature every now and then.
What i don't understand is how the scores vary over Veritas and Manhattan mocks.
I scored a 660 in Veritas, but 530 in Manhattan.
I must say I found the quant on MGMAT much much tuffer than that on Veritas.
I am very confused at this stage and the D-day is exactly a month from now!

Regards,
Mallika

Hi Mallika.

The quant on MGMAT is not necessarily an accurate representation of GMAT questions. There are often more steps needed to answer MGMAT quant questions than to answer official GMAT questions. I recently sat for the Official GMAT again and found the quant to be much like PowerPrep quant. Also, the verbal questions on MGMAT CATs are sometimes not that tight. So they can be difficult to get right.

I can also tell you this, Mallika. Much of what it takes to rock this test is made up of determination and intensity. So work on being very careful and very determined to get right answers.

In general there is no sense ever getting "frustrated" or discouraged. The only thing to do is figure things out and have at it.

I still think you can rock verbal if you approach the questions with a certain mindset.

Maybe this discussion of how to approach verbal will be useful to you.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/an-alternati ... 82025.html

Also, check out this example.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/young-group- ... tml#741262

Marty Murray wrote:

Hi Marty,

I took another Manhattan mock last week and scored 530[Q36, V27]- Of course I used the pause feature every now and then.
What i don't understand is how the scores vary over Veritas and Manhattan mocks.
I scored a 660 in Veritas, but 530 in Manhattan.
I must say I found the quant on MGMAT much much tuffer than that on Veritas.
I am very confused at this stage and the D-day is exactly a month from now!

Regards,
Mallika

Hi Mallika.

The quant on MGMAT is not necessarily an accurate representation of GMAT questions. There are often more steps needed to answer MGMAT quant questions than to answer official GMAT questions. I recently sat for the Official GMAT again and found the quant to be much like PowerPrep quant. Also, the verbal questions on MGMAT CATs are sometimes not that tight. So they can be difficult to get right.

I can also tell you this, Mallika. Much of what it takes to rock this test is made up of determination and intensity. So work on being very careful and very determined to get right answers.

In general there is no sense ever getting "frustrated" or discouraged. The only thing to do is figure things out and have at it.

I still think you can rock verbal if you approach the questions with a certain mindset.

Maybe this discussion of how to approach verbal will be useful to you.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/an-alternati ... 82025.html

Also, check out this example.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/young-group- ... tml#741262

Hi Marty,

How've you been..? It's been a while since I bugged you

I've taken 3 Veritas mocks so far-

#1: 620[Q42, V33]
#2: 620[Q43, V33]
#3: 670[Q45, V37]

I got a score of 670, with Q45 and V37.
I must tell you that Quant was almost exasperating, in that the questions were very tough, one after the other and I think I can do them, but in under 2 mins, I doubt.
Also, after the test, I reviewed the number of questions I got wrong, and a whopping 17 out of 37 were wrong!
How, did I land up with a score of 670 in the mock is my question..

Also, I'm sticking to Veritas mocks so I can monitor my progress with one test prep company.

Any inputs..?


Thanks much,
Mallika

I've taken 3 Veritas mocks so far-

#1: 620[Q42, V33]
#2: 620[Q43, V33]
#3: 670[Q45, V37]

I got a score of 670, with Q45 and V37.
I must tell you that Quant was almost exasperating, in that the questions were very tough, one after the other and I think I can do them, but in under 2 mins, I doubt.
Also, after the test, I reviewed the number of questions I got wrong, and a whopping 17 out of 37 were wrong!
How, did I land up with a score of 670 in the mock is my question..

Also, I'm sticking to Veritas mocks so I can monitor my progress with one test prep company.

Any inputs..?

For starters I prefer to look at how many questions one gets right. So you got 20 right. With around 30 right you can score V51, at least if they are in a certain order. So 20 right is a great start.

In my experience official quant questions are designed to be a little more 2 minutes friendly than are the Veritas questions. So that's part of what's going on. Still, you did a pretty nice job this time.

Now, look over the questions and see which you could do faster, or more accurately, and work on those question types. Could you be better at circles? or overlapping sets? or absolute value?

You got 20 questions right. If you can get 26, or more, right on the actual test, your score will be even higher, as long as you are getting questions right one after the other so that you get harder, higher scoring questions.

So find areas of quant that you can get better, and faster, at, and work on them.

That verbal score went up too. Nice. Maybe you were being more determined this time. Maybe you were really hacking those verbal questions.

In any case, keep learning SC rules and keep learning to hack your way to right verbal answers, and maybe you can drive it up even higher. I bet you can.

One guy I have been working with was having real trouble with CR. We spent a week or two working on hacking and his CR score shot up and his RC score more than doubled!!!

So make sure you understand parallelism, uses of tenses, subject verb agreement and other SC basics, and work on hacking hacking hacking.

I bet just with better hacking skills you could get that verbal score above 40.

One thing you can do is go over the verbal questions you didn't get and figure out how you could have gotten them.

Finally, I am not clear as to whether you have been using official practice CATs, such as can be found on GMAT Prep and PowerPrep. If not, then you better. No other practice tests as closely match the real test as those official CATs do, and I have seen people get shocked when they went to take the real test, because somehow the style of the actual GMAT did not quite match that of the practice CATs they had been using.

Part of learning to rock this test is about learning how to answer the questions. Another part is about learning to answer tough question after tough question in 75 minutes, doing you best to score high.

So if you have not, take a GMAT prep test, or two. You might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of the questions, and you will get some good practice. Veritas is great and pretty accurate, but GMAT Prep is even more accurate.

Marty Murray wrote:
For starters I prefer to look at how many questions one gets right. So you got 20 right. With around 30 right you can score V51, at least if they are in a certain order. So 20 right is a great start.

In my experience official quant questions are designed to be a little more 2 minutes friendly than are the Veritas questions. So that's part of what's going on. Still, you did a pretty nice job this time.

Now, look over the questions and see which you could do faster, or more accurately, and work on those question types. Could you be better at circles? or overlapping sets? or absolute value?

You got 20 questions right. If you can get 26, or more, right on the actual test, your score will be even higher, as long as you are getting questions right one after the other so that you get harder, higher scoring questions.

So find areas of quant that you can get better, and faster, at, and work on them.

That verbal score went up too. Nice. Maybe you were being more determined this time. Maybe you were really hacking those verbal questions.

In any case, keep learning SC rules and keep learning to hack your way to right verbal answers, and maybe you can drive it up even higher. I bet you can.

One guy I have been working with was having real trouble with CR. We spent a week or two working on hacking and his CR score shot up and his RC score more than doubled!!!

So make sure you understand parallelism, uses of tenses, subject verb agreement and other SC basics, and work on hacking hacking hacking.

I bet just with better hacking skills you could get that verbal score above 40.

One thing you can do is go over the verbal questions you didn't get and figure out how you could have gotten them.

Finally, I am not clear as to whether you have been using official practice CATs, such as can be found on GMAT Prep and PowerPrep. If not, then you better. No other practice tests as closely match the real test as those official CATs do, and I have seen people get shocked when they went to take the real test, because somehow the style of the actual GMAT did not quite match that of the practice CATs they had been using.

Part of learning to rock this test is about learning how to answer the questions. Another part is about learning to answer tough question after tough question in 75 minutes, doing you best to score high.

So if you have not, take a GMAT prep test, or two. You might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of the questions, and you will get some good practice. Veritas is great and pretty accurate, but GMAT Prep is even more accurate.

Hi Marty,

As advised, I took a GMAT Prep mock yesterday and scored 640[Q41,V36].
I observed that I spent more than 2 mins on some questions in the beginning and was pressed for time by Q20 in Quant.
I couldn't attempt Q36 and Q37 in Quant.
On Verbal, I usually get all SC and CR right with RC being my weak area.Last night however, I got a couple of CRs wrong-I attribute this to exhaustion.

One doubt I have is, the instructions say that you can't end the exam before time.What does this mean..?
Say I'm on the last question and I have 10 mins to spare in that section, I can't submit my answer.??
We submit on the last second..?That might be a little tough isn't it, to maybe submit when you have exactly 1 second to go..

Have I understood this right, or does ending the exam mean something else..?

Many thanks for your help,
Mallika

You can answer that last question any time you want. I am not sure what you are referring to. Maybe they are saying that you can't end the exam without completing all the questions.

To speed up quant, maybe try visualizing your getting them all done very quickly and accurately. I did some meditation to speed up and increase my accuracy in quant and I went from having trouble getting them all done to having time to check my work and still finishing the section early.

Meanwhile, that's so sweeeeet that you are normally getting all CR and SC right.

Figure out what kinds of RC questions are getting you, main idea, inference, or whatever they are, and I bet you can get them all right too.

If you are having trouble processing the passages, figure out why that is. The passages are not that crazy complicated. I have seen someone repeatedly respond to passages by saying like, "I just don't get what this passage is saying" and when I have responded by saying like "Well then figure it out," he has gone back at it and come up with a spot on analysis of the meaning and structure of the passage. So he can do it when he really has at it.

Marty Murray wrote:You can answer that last question any time you want. I am not sure what you are referring to. Maybe they are saying that you can't end the exam without completing all the questions.

To speed up quant, maybe try visualizing your getting them all done very quickly and accurately. I did some meditation to speed up and increase my accuracy in quant and I went from having trouble getting them all done to having time to check my work and still finishing the section early.

Meanwhile, that's so sweeeeet that you are normally getting all CR and SC right.

Figure out what kinds of RC questions are getting you, main idea, inference, or whatever they are, and I bet you can get them all right too.

If you are having trouble processing the passages, figure out why that is. The passages are not that crazy complicated. I have seen someone repeatedly respond to passages by saying like, "I just don't get what this passage is saying" and when I have responded by saying like "Well then figure it out," he has gone back at it and come up with a spot on analysis of the meaning and structure of the passage. So he can do it when he really has at it.

Thanks Marty- I tried another mock today- GMATPrep and scored 680[Q49, V34]
Again, I got 17 questions wrong in Quant, and am really puzzled about the 680.

I have posted some questions on the PS and DS forums, please will it be possible to help with those..?

I will keep you posted on my GMAT score, D-day this Saturday.. Looks like I might be heading for a re-take

Best,
Mallika

My recommendation for these last two days is to work in a bit of mindfulness meditation. A very brief practice can have a beneficial impact on standardized test scores: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... on/275564/

mallika hunsur wrote:
Thanks Marty- I tried another mock today- GMATPrep and scored 680[Q49, V34]
Again, I got 17 questions wrong in Quant, and am really puzzled about the 680.

I have posted some questions on the PS and DS forums, please will it be possible to help with those..?

I will keep you posted on my GMAT score, D-day this Saturday.. Looks like I might be heading for a re-take

Looks as if you are jamming on quant.

Maybe you can get some insight into how to score higher on verbal by going over the questions you didn't get and seeing how you could have gotten them. I bet with the right mindset you could score significantly higher on verbal.

And do that meditation that David recommended. That could help a lot.