GMAT Strategy

Two thoughts:

1) Are you spending roughly the first 30 seconds on every question to mentally track how you will solve the problem? Things you should think about include (note this is primarly for quant):
* What similar problems to this have I seen in the past?
* If there were similar problems, what was the solution path to the correct choice?
* Can that same solution path be applied here?
* What traps have you seen before in this type of problem?
* For those traps, what lessons learned do I have to step over the trap or walk around the trap or disable the trap?
* Can I mentally visualize the start point, end point and intermediate steps I'll need to write down on paper?
* Is this a question that I have no clue about - that just completely puzzles me?
* If so, what is the fundamental principle they are testing me on?
* For that principle, is it a strength or a weakness?
* If it's a weakness, how big a weakness? should I just guess and move on?

You should be able to do that instinctively almost once you have mastered most topics. In fact, if you have mastered the topic you won't even need to answer them, you'll look at the problem and know immediately what the solution path is.

2) You have, in the past few days, created a gigantic list of lessons learned and other notes and strategies. My worry is that you are overwhelming yourself with them and stretching yourself too thin. You may want to consider trimming the list down to find the most important areas you need to work on and the most important lessons that you need to internalize and apply.

My overarching strategy for study was quite simple: In order to hit 700, I need to be good at everything. Every question missed needs to be dealt with no matter what area, what topic, or how difficult.

Try to stick with a "simple plan" of attack instead of overburdening yourself with strategies and rules and notes and lessons and all kinds of other stuff. If you do that, you spend too much time "creating" notes and not enough time "applying" notes.

IN order to fix the weaknesses, I will go over the flash cards which are getting quite old to me because I know where I went wrong. ON top of this, I printed out the mistakes of my last 3 exams. Ys it was a bit time consuming but it looks promising. I can see where I went wrong on 80% of the questions the others I had to solve or post online. Each night I will go over the mistakes and see where I went wrong and try to internalize the mistakes. IT is very important to make a right plan.

BUt If I had to pick my top points to work on. THey would be:
1. CR
2.SC
3. FIx the rest of the odds and ends of math while not losing any ground. Each day I get a bit better at math anyways.

After careful review of my verbal mistakes, I finally started climing in my points. The trick is the same, to learn the information and gather a lesson on the weakness and then practice, practice and practice.

Verbal:

questions were all done under timed conditions.
SC OG questions: 103/138 which gives me a 75% correct (this is my biggest weakness in verbal. I was horrible in SC but new all the tested grammar. I was not seeing the splits and using the splits to direct me to the right answer. ALso, one needs to stay very aggressive in identifying the differences. THis has helped me a lot.

CR OG questions 101/124 which gives me a 81.4% correct. THe key here is to understand the question types just like in all areas of verbal but also pay very strong attention to the wrong answers. Stacy helped me a lot by playing a game to find the wrong answer and eliminate with reason. THis has helped my whole exam! ALso, a huge key is to personalize the stimulus and even the question. To me, this personalization is the same as rephrasing with DS questions. THe material is not complex it is only presented in a complex manner. BUt each and every question is testing something exttremely simple. Its the test makers job to make it look hard. Can you blame him or her? lol

RC, Personalization also helped me in RC also. I am hitting 90% and just need to stay on top of my game.

I have exhausted my og questions and will need to take practice cat soon.

Just took the gmatprep and received 600 (36q and 36v) this is not good and pretty dissapointing. After taking a day off, I am not so annoyed. THis is not even close to my capabilities. I dont know if there is a difference between the gmatprep and powerprep CAT. I took the GMATPREP. BUt there is good news even though I had a bad score. ALmost all my mistakes could have been easily avoided.

Quantitative:
Need to work on coordinate geometry (ony geometry weakness)
WOrd problems- must read every words, understand full contenct and question being asked.

Hastiness is a huge weakness i.e. missed keyword in question (three questions), missed sign, wasn't alert and let simple tested rule slip by (two questions)

and only completely stumped 3 times.

Verbal: I made my weakness in SC and CR improve but missed every single inference question on rc. IF i got the inference questions correct, I would have had a perfect score for RC.

I am wondering if this gmatprep exam was a fluke!

Since you've changed your study habits how many practice cats have you taken? Is this one the first? As I mentioned in the previous post, identifying lessons and learning about them in a timed practice environment where you are practicing problems in the same general score range (e.g. 40 consecutive CR problems from OG) is not the same as applying your newfound techniques and lessons in a cat environment. If this is your first cat, it should be no surprise that your score did not show a significant shift. Be patient with yourself and have confidence that you are on the right path, that you are learning correctly, and that you really learning and the improvements will show up eventually in your scores. Just look at my scores and you'll see them fall and drop. There was one point where my score went from 650 to 570 followed by a drop to 540!! That's a huge demoralizing drop, but look what happened in the following weeks...

Very interesting posts. How many hours a day are/were you studying? And when you say ur scores improved from the previous 38/45 to 43/45. Are/were you solving all the 45 problems for the second time?