GMAT Strategy

responses inline

gmat_this_sat! wrote:All i apologize for the lengthy post, but I really need help deciding if i should retake the GMAT for a third time and if so, how to prepare given a lack of materials, time and confidence.

My story:

I took the GMAT twice. The first time my weakness was in Math - i only scored in the 59th percentile with a 42 and also got a 42 in the Verbal section. Overall 690.
For this first test, I studied straight for two months (I had no other commitments during this time). My studying included a MGMAT class - followed the syllanbus precisely while doing every OG problem and every advanced section of the MGMAT materials. during this time i took 5 practice tests from MGMAT and the GMAT Prep test. Mostly my scores were higher than 690, with a much higher verbal in practice.

it sounds as though you studied every single day.
if so, then that's bad -- you should be sure to take at least 1 day per week completely away from studying, for reasons that i outlined at the beginning of this post:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/confused-how ... tml#366523

if you don't take time off, then your verbal scores WILL go down -- because, to put it bluntly, you simply won't be able to think anymore if you study seven days a week. (this is also the reason why organizations in which individual flexible thinking is a bad thing -- such as the military -- don't allow people much if any free time. those people know exactly what they are doing.)

also, note that you should prioritize the "general" sections over the "advanced" sections in the quant books, regardless of your current performance level. the "advanced" sections are relatively unimportant; they contain rare topics that we've seen in one or two official problems, but that we've just included for the sake of completeness. ALL of the major quantitative topics are in the "general" sections.
you will notice that, when GMAT math problems are "hard", they are very rarely ever "hard" by virtue of testing hard math topics. instead, they are "hard" because they are ingeniously flexible and clever in their treatment of extremely basic math topics. (the vast majority of gmat problems on which my students have had the lowest % correct answers have involved only basic math, such as arithmetic, odds/evens, basic algebra, and the like.)

The lowest I have ever scored in verbal - EVER (including my very first practice test when I hadnt even started studying for the GMAT yet).

this doesn't really surprise me, given what you wrote above.

the first thing to ascertain here is whether you understand what the CR and RC components of this test are and what they are not.
specifically, it is IMPOSSIBLE to memorize any finite set of "rules" that will solve the problems in those two sections. (the attempt to develop such a set of rules is called "strong artificial intelligence" -- and nobody has been able to do it, even after trillions of dollars invested into decades and decades of research.)
so, if you are thinking that you can actually memorize rules for RC and CR -- which i assume you probably are, based on the study time you've described -- then you are actually trying to do the impossible.

that's the bad news. the good news is that you already have all the tools you need for RC and CR, just by virtue of being a human being who uses day-to-day reasoning processes.
the single biggest obstacle in your way is thinking of this as an "academic" test (in which case your own common sense will just disappear and you'll try to "learn" things by rote). this is NOT an "academic" test, especially in CR and RC; if you can stop thinking of it as though it were, then your performance in those two areas will quickly return to its original level.
in other words, it's not a coincidence that you scored higher in verbal before you ever started studying -- because, back then, you were still using your own common sense and intuition to solve CR and RC problems!

the only thing you really need to study for these problems (provided that you can understand the level of english written on the test, and that you have a basic ground-level understanding of how arguments work) is a VERY GENERAL understanding of the problem types work.
for instance:
* on RC inference questions, you need to pick the statement that must be true.
* on strengthen/weaken problems, you need to identify the main issue in the argument, and evaluate the answer choices solely in terms of how they affect that main issue.
etc.
really, these are the only types of things you need to learn in CR and RC. anything more specific is just going to be noise that gets in the way.

try watching the cr and rc videos here:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/thursdays-with-ron.cfm
you may want to start with the video from 3/3/11, because that covers strengthen/weaken (a topic that accounts for about half of all CR problems). in any and all of these videos, note the complete lack of specific "rules" required to solve the problems.

SC may be a different story.
you are obviously a native speaker of english, meaning that your situation is going to be very different from that of most people on this board.
most SC materials, including our own, are written in a way primarily geared for people who are not native speakers of english (because these are generally the people who need SC resources the most).
if you are a native speaker of english -- especially if you are accomplished enough to have initially scored that high -- that it's very possible that you can solve a large number of SC problems solely by using your "feel" for the written language. in addition, there are a number of areas -- most notably verb tenses, but also idioms and certain aspects of modifiers -- on which you will probably get worse by actually studying.
so, your approach to SC should be different. you should NOT try to study every area of SC -- because you probably know most of it already, albeit subconsciously in most cases. instead, you should work your way through some problems and then, when you actually get things wrong, go to the appropriate sections of the learning materials. in your case, this may mean that you might leave 80% of the SC guide untouched (or not, depending on your performance).

My math was a 48 - 80th percentile. A 660 in total. All that work amounted to a big waste of my time with a score that will never help me.

hmm.
well, don't neglect demographics, either. on average, the gmat scores for admitted students are 30-50 points lower than those for male students, depending on the school -- so, if you happen to be female (your username is indeterminate), then a 660 is definitely not "a score that will never help [you]". there are also the usual unwritten rules for ethnic minorities, etc., if you happen to be one of those.

My goal, as I started to mention before, is to get 730 or higher, with math in the 80th percentile and verbal back where it was in the beginning - 90th percentile. Ill even settle for high 80th. This whole process has been extremely upsetting, agonizing and made me reassess what my skills truly are. I do not have a formal quant-bakcground, as I was a liberal arts major, but I have been good in quant and certainly great in qual/verbal-related subject areas. The question now is if i try to retake the exam or not, and if so, how do i study and when should I take it?

honestly, from where i sit, my primary advice for you would be to study very little between now and your next test administration. in fact, you probably shouldn't study CR or RC pretty much at all, apart from perhaps watching my thursday videos and then doing a *small* number of practice problems to let the concepts sink in. as soon as you are comfortable with the GENERAL way in which the various CR and RC types work, stop studying; at that point, the only effect of further studying will be to remove your common sense / intuition and replace it with spurious "rules" that don't really work.
also, do some official SC's. if you get most or all of them right, then don't study SC. if you miss more than an insignificant number of them, then study the specific aspects you missed, but do not undertake a massive general study of a language that you (mostly) already know very well.

There are a few barriers to taking the test again:
(1)I cannot take ANY days off from work (including the day before the exam, which I would take on a Saturday)

this is fine; honestly, i don't think you need to study for more than a few days during the intervening interval.

(2)I have NO practice tests left. Ive re-run all the MGMAT tests, took all the Kaplan, took Veritas prep, took both gmat preps and bought and took all three gmat focus quant sections. I also have done SO many quant problems and do not know where to turn.

you scored a Q48, which is an awesome score. (forget percentiles; the quant percentiles are artificially deflated because of the huge number of tech people taking the exam. if anyone tells you that you "need" an 80th percentile quant score, then smile and ignore them.)

with a score like that, all you need is a small bit of "maintenance" -- just work a few problems a week. there's not much danger that you'll forget anything, since most of the actual math involved is pretty basic.

be sure to study BACKUP METHODS (see my thursday study hall from feb. 4, 2010). these are WAY more important than any specific piece of math knowledge. in fact, the three methods shown in that session, taken together, can solve almost half the problems on the entire test (!!)

(3)Work will keep me busy - i started a new project and will be working 65-75 hrs a week

be sure to take at least 1 day per week where you do NOTHING mentally taxing. no work stuff (unless it's so routine that you can do it without really paying attention or exerting effort), no gmat. if you don't do this, you are hurting yourself (psychophysiologically as well as in terms of the gmat).

(4)Ive lost all my confidence, and am deeply concerned about maintaining my math score, which did not arrive naturally at a 48, and about gettin verbla up if I only have some LSAT materials to work with (ive exhausted most other resources).

at this point, the single biggest thing you can do in verbal is close the books and chill.

the CR and RC sections are entirely meant to measure skills that you already have. if you try to study "specifics" for these sections, you *will* do worse.
as an analogy, imagine learning a hundred thousand zillion rules for, say, social interaction -- versus just using your own experience and intuition to evaluate social situations.
which is better?
if you try to memorize a bunch of rules, what will happen to your intuition?
the same applies here.

good luck.