GMAT 590 (Q40 V31) - Need study tips for retake!

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by ogbeni » Sun Sep 13, 2009 12:35 pm
Looks like Verbal is your achilles heel. Definitely get powerscore CR. It is a worthwile investment.

I'm kinda like in the same boat as you. I'm on a retake mission as I was thoroughly sonned by the GMAT.

What I've found is that my timing is off so my focus is now on pacing and not so much on content/concepts.

For quant, I've learned how to pace myself but I'm still the process of learning how to "let go" of those questions I feel that I can solve. The good thing about the GMAT is that it is ADAPTIVE. Even though you get a 700-800 question wrong, you still get props so it is not a zero-sum scenario. I would beat myself for getting n number of questions wrong but what matters is whether the questions you get wrong are difficult questions!! On the otherhand, you don't want to get easy questions wrong! I keep reminding myself of that fact and that if I make an educated guess, I can probably make up for the guess on the next question.

For verbal, this is where my timing gets screwy because of mental fatigue so I'm training myself to get my timing improved here. Sentence correction is fine. I've learned to do these in < 1minute. Critical Reasoning, to me, is the deal breaker and this is where PowersScore and practice comes in handy. You need to get to a point where you can read the question stem quickly and then eliminate out of scope /incorrect answers as quickly as possible. If you can do this successfully you'll buy yourself time to process the information in the RC passages and ace them all. To me RC is actually where you can help to boost your Verbal score. Your chances of getting all the answers on RC are a lot higher than say CR or SC because you are getting tested on a fixed subject for about 6 consecutive questions.

Verbal can make or break your target score. If you can get your Verbal score to be > 41, you are well on your way to >700 if you perform slightly better on your quant on your retake.

Finally, practice, practice, practice!!!! Keep doing those GMAT Prep tests over and over again, the GMAC software refreshes and throws new questions at you even though you'd still get some repeats.