GMAT Strategy

Hi guys,
So I have been coming here a lot the past few month, mostly reading and hoping to only have to post once... a I just beat the GMAT story. I think that it is a good time to seek advice from you. I know that the community can be harsh sometimes with bold statements such as "you'll never get in" / "you won't have time to improve, there is no way" but some of you are more incline to post some words of encouragement. I guess I am mostly looking for that and ways to improve.

A little bit about me. I am a 25 years old, French guy with 2.5 years of experience so far at 2 large companies from completely different sectors (US Investment bank and leading e-commerce company). I know that it is a good time for me to go to business school in America for professional and personal reasons.
To go where I want to go I need a score of at least 700 at the GMAT to compensate for my limited work experience.

My first try was in August, I scored a 650 (Q45 and V35 - 79%), while this score is alright it is clearly not enough. I am retaking the test at the beginning of October with the idea that if I fail again I could retake the test one last time before the second round is due on 11/9 for my target school.

I have done many prep tests, the results were as follow:
MGmAT
1: 630
2: 650
3: 700
4: 670
Gmat prep: 630
5: 620
Gmat prep 2: 660
6: 640
retake1: 660
retake2: 650
retake3: 630

My last test was a little bit demoralizing and that is probably why I am coming to you guys. I believe I have the wrong mind set, I am pissed off every time I get a question wrong and assume that I was not concentrated enough and did a silly mistake. I rarely review thoroughly the mgmat math questions, so I guess I could review them all to try to improve.

What I am doing right now:
1 - Redoing every single question of the OG Purple and Green (Math) - I am doing all the questions and then I will start reviewing why I got them wrong. I downloaded the excel spreadsheet from the website to see how my % I got right: I am around 75% for both normal questions and DS.
2 - I will start the review of those questions tomorrow.
3 - Wednesday I will establish where I need improvement and go through the corresponding MGMAT books again.
4 - I have never worked on the verbal part, regularly got a 75% to 85% in MGMAT so assumed I was okay. I had a disappointing 35 at the real test so I will need to spend extra time on SC/RC as well. How many hours to you think I should spend on SC (I can work after work for 3hours every day and 6hours/day during the remaining 3 week ends)

My questions:
- Do you think that my strategy is appropriate for the limited time left?
- Can you see any area of improvement? (For example I am redoing the easy questions as well to improve my speed, but am I wasting time when I do this?)
- How relevant is it to work on RC when I had a 45 in math at the actual test, shouldn't I spend all my time on math to try to get it up to a 48/49?

I know you don't have a of details on how I work to help me improve but maybe some of you can have a few ideas.

I look forward to here from all of you.

Take care!

hi there !

your plan seems to sound pretty good.. considering that you are 3 weeks away from test day... i wud recommend 2 weeks of heavy training and cooling it off one week before the test (where you mostly redo & revisit what you have already done and that helps you build up your confidence)...

I wud recommend the manhattan gmat for SC & RC as well.. but these 2 can be pretty time consuming to go thru .. but if you wanna do better on the RC asap , then get the Manhattan RC book and go thru the first 2 chapters.. they are quite 'enlightening' ...

If i were you.. i wud take the last week off from work.. so I have more time to make my mind focus only on the gmat...

all in all.. u seem to be quite ready.. there is nothing "demoralizing" about your last score.. there are MANY ppl who wish they cud have tht score... its just a test.. better essays & recommendation letters can make up for a "not so wow" GMAT score i guess.. and theres always the option to redo the test...

all the best !

Cheers,
Rohit

Hi Tarcid,

How many hours per day do you have to study? From your post, it sounds like there are a few things going on. The first thing that jumped out to me is that you said that you get upset when you miss a problem. One thing that I would recommend is to really focus on not being afraid to get a problem wrong. What I mean by that is you can't be so uptight and worried about missing something or being tricked by the test makers that you second guess yourself. This is your test. Really own the experience. Second guessing yourself only leads to more wrong answers.

Another thing that I noticed was your verbal score on the real thing. If you got a 35 on the verbal, I would spend at least 2 hours a day strictly on verbal. The thing that really helped me was developing a system for verbal. I'll give you an example. With Critical Reasoning, I would read the question. Then I would identify the question type. Next, I would read the prompt and identify the conclusion (if it had a conclusion). I believe that going through those steps for every single CR question really helped standardize the process. What I found is that I developed consistency. What you want to happen with your prep is that you want to always get the same types of problems right if you know the material. If you don't have a consistent approach, it is easy to miss problems that you know how to do and usually answer correctly. That was my long winded way of saying, spend your final three weeks developing a system for approaching each of the different question types. By doing this, it will make you more comfortable during the exam, because you have a standardized way of tackling each problem so you won't worry about drawing a blank.

I hope that helped, let me know if you have any other questions.