graciacy wrote:eladshush
Obviously, my problem is as the same as what you had before your 5th try. I am very bad in verbal part and need focus on verbal.
Anyway,I knew exactly where is my weak area that is verbal and focused on it. I finished all SC questions OG 12th, which I had done 3 times during my previous test preparation. I redo all the questions and noted all mistakes I made. I made sure myself understand clearly the answers explainations in OG, and resorted to web for those I felt unclear. I was pretty sure that I got everything clear,then made pratices everyday on beatthegmat.com. During last two weeks I can feel my improvement almost everyday. Although I have very short time to prepare,I feel all my studying is very efficient. It would be better if I could have 2 more weeks time but I need submit my score no later than 7th. I know I was a little bit rushed but I felt it is going to be OK if I can feel myselves improved comparing to last time I took test.
I underestimated the difficulites of taking a 3.5hours test with such high tempo stress. I felt so exicted and panic for loosing control of the time that I finished Q part 10 mins ahead! Then I came to verbal part, I managed to have better control at this stage and finish all the questions just in time. I did rushly pick serveral answers for one RC passage, I kept focuing on timing and could not remember anything I read. And the end I did hesitate to cancel the test but I would never cancel one. Then I got the miserable score.
GraciaCY
Hello GraciaCY,
There are a number of things that I'd like to add if you will. Also, you'd be able to have a look at my earlier response to similar issues here (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/gmat-660-qua ... tml#398833).
1. know exactly which one/ones of the Verbal section you are weak at, whether SC or CR or RC, or even all of them. Once you identify the sections, you can move on to drill further to the type of questions that you find difficult to solve. Also, you need to get yourself used to having a high level of certainty of your answer choice, and one way to do so is to understand why all the answer choices, besides the one you choose, are incorrect. Even if you end up with two choices, unless you can confidently tell why the other one is wrong, you will never be certain of your answer choice.
One good strategy would be to immediately after reading a question focus your energy on finding the mistakes/errors of each answer choices, and NOT to try identifying the correct answer.
2. there is a slight difference between practicing the OG and over practicing it, but the impact is huge. Certainly, you want to get yourself familiar with the OG questions, but you don't want to engrave yourself with those questions because real GMAT questions will not to full extent be similar to the OG questions, although they do to a large extent. My point is, get familiar with the OG questions but DON'T overdo them.
3. I'm not sure which Prep Test you referred to, but you need to only depend your hunch of your likely test score on the results of GMAT Prep tests since GMAT Prep and OG are really the only sources that provide questions that most resemble the ones you see on real GMAT tests. Yet, GMAT Prep does not provide explanations to the answers, while OG does provide some. I personally think that the Manhattan GMAT forum provides the most reasonable and comprehensible explanations.
4. I don't know how you take the prep tests you mentioned, but if you skipped the essays when taking those practice tests, you may want to stop doing so. You need to include the essays on every practice tests you take, otherwise your score would be artificially inflated.