GMAT Strategy

Hi everyone,

I am looking to take my GMAT at the end of March and hoping to get a score in the mid-600's. Many of those who have scored well in the posts I have seen (and I probably haven't seen them all) have started with a high score. However, my case is a little different as I am currently scoring in the mid-400's. I have been studying since the middle of December and my results are as follows:

PowerPrep 1: 430

3wks of studying

PR online Test: 450

I have done many practice questions in the OG, 11thEd and am now doing practice questions from the Kaplan Premier Program book. I'm scoring a 70-75% in my verbal practice questions. I will take another test(probably Kaplan) this weekend to determine any progress made.

Are there any suggestions for this type of situation where I'm looking for a big increase in score? I know that some of you have done this and as a matter of fact, I have been recently inspired by a fellow blogger who started in the 500s and scored a 720 on the real deal.

Your thoughts...............

medea66 wrote: I'm scoring a 70-75% in my verbal practice questions. I will take another test(probably Kaplan) this weekend to determine any progress made.

Are there any suggestions for this type of situation where I'm looking for a big increase in score? .

getting inspired from others achievement comes free! use that postive energy & fight with vigilance!

Scoring 70-80% at verbal section is decent accuracy I would say, probably you should concentrate more on improving quant score as its common to have higher quant score in the test! & If you dont score at least ave in quant your overall GMAT score would fall dramatically!!


All the best

Thanks for the tip!

Can you tell us how you study? What is your schedule/pattern of study? How do you go over what you've gotten wrong? What are your cat raw score breakdowns? These questions will provide a little more insight and we can move forward from there ...

Basically, I pick a section (PS, DS, Sent. Corr) and do about 20-40 problems each night from that section under timed conditions. I then look at what I've gotten wrong and re-do all of the incorrect problems. I then do the entire set (right and wrong problems) over again. I have been practicing out of OG 11th Ed and now Kaplan Premier Pack. I have also ordered the OG Quant & Verbal workouts and will begin those after Kaplan.

I re-took the PP1 Test about 4 weeks after I first took it and scored a 520 (Q32, V28). Although I have yet to decipher the results, I went back and looked at the first 10 questions of each section to see how many of these crucial questions were incorrect. I was shocked to see that out of the first 10 questions on the Quant, the following numbers were incorrect: #3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and the following were incorrect for the Verbal: #4, 6, 8.

I was surprised I got that many wrong on the Quant initially as I thought these questions were not that difficult.

That's quite a good approach. I would consider a tutor, though, to help you finetune the specific problems. And I wouldn't use Kaplan materials.

wow your definitley on the same boat as me lol.
I think you should practice as much as you can, and you seem to have a problem with the quantitive section more than the verbal. Try doing more quantative problems but don't quit on the verbal section either.

Keep practicing daily!
Practice as much as you can so that you get use to it and gain more confidence to perform better on the real exam!

Good Luck and keep us updated

medea66 wrote:Basically, I pick a section (PS, DS, Sent. Corr) and do about 20-40 problems each night from that section under timed conditions. I then look at what I've gotten wrong and re-do all of the incorrect problems. I then do the entire set (right and wrong problems) over again. I have been practicing out of OG 11th Ed and now Kaplan Premier Pack. I have also ordered the OG Quant & Verbal workouts and will begin those after Kaplan.

I re-took the PP1 Test about 4 weeks after I first took it and scored a 520 (Q32, V28). Although I have yet to decipher the results, I went back and looked at the first 10 questions of each section to see how many of these crucial questions were incorrect. I was shocked to see that out of the first 10 questions on the Quant, the following numbers were incorrect: #3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and the following were incorrect for the Verbal: #4, 6, 8.

I was surprised I got that many wrong on the Quant initially as I thought these questions were not that difficult.

You have a steady and consistent approach that should yield good results. I have one question though: you mentioned that after you do the problems under timed conditions, you re-do all the incorrect ones, but do you spend any time going over the solutions for the problems? How much time do you spend analyzing what you did wrong versus trying to re-do the problems just for the sake of redoing them? And lastly, how are you tracking your mistakes and what steps are you taking to fix them?

When I first started, my approach was like yours - just redo the problems I got wrong. What I noticed that was after a few weeks, if I went back and reworked those same problems under timed conditions again, about 75% of the time, I'd miss them again! In other words, I wasn't learning or I had forgotten what I had learned weeks before.

This is why I am asking about your approach to learning from your mistakes versus redoing the problems just for the sake of saying that you redid the problems. You can review my blog about my approach to learning from past mistakes and how to track them.

Test yourself - go back and redo problems that you missed weeks ago (and hopefully ones that you no longer remember the solution to) and do them again under timed conditions. Are you getting them wrong again?