GMAT Strategy

Received a PM asking me to respond. Yes, as you mentioned, it's not ideal to try to compress everything into such a short timeframe.

Paradoxically: please do not make the mistake of trying to do too much in that timeframe. For example, even if you were studying for 2 months, I'd still tell you not to take all 6 CATs. CAT exams are really good for (a) figuring out where you're scoring right now, (b) practicing stamina, and (c) analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. The actual act of just taking the exam is NOT so useful for improving. It's what you do with the test results / between tests that helps you to improve.

In general, I recommend CATs every 2-3 weeks until you get to 2 weeks before the official test. Then, take one 2 weeks before and another 1 week before. That's it. So if you've got a month, that's 3 tests: 1 now, 1 in 2 weeks, 1 in 3 weeks.

I really can't think of a circumstance in which I think it would be a good idea to take a test more frequently than once a week. You need to do significant study between tests before it's worth it to take another practice test, and there's only so much you can cram into your brain in 4 days.

You do need to follow a few guidelines to minimize the chance of artificially inflating your score via question repeats in the future. First, anytime you see a problem that you remember (and this means: I know the answer or I'm pretty sure I remember the answer, not just "hmm, this looks familiar..."), immediately look at the timer and make yourself sit there for the full length of time for that question type. This way, you don't artificially give yourself more time than you should have. Second, think about whether you got this problem right the last time. If you did, get it right again this time. If you didn't, get it wrong again. If you *completely honestly* think that you would get it right this time around if it were a new question (even though you got it wrong last time) because you've studied that area and improved, then get it right this time.

Now, on to the scoring. The test is not scored based on percentage correct. Everybody gets a lot of questions wrong, no matter how good we get. For example, you got a 41 verbal, which is around the 92nd percentile - a great score. But you "only" got about 82% of the questions right!

Most people get somewhere around 60% of questions right - that only changes significantly if you're really high (as you are in verbal) or really low.

So, the ones that you didn't really know how to solve. How much time did you spend on them? Oh, wait, it was a GMATPrep test, so you don't have that data. Well, take an MGMAT test and see what happens. The test is always going to give you a certain number of questions that are just too hard for you. When this happens, your natural instinct will be to spend extra time and the natural result is that you'll get most wrong anyway. Your strategic advantage is to recognize when you just can't do something in the expected timeframe (2min) and let it go. Literally get it wrong faster - because you're probably going to get it wrong anyway.

How does this help? Well, remember those 13 careless mistakes? At least some of those were due to speed. If you aren't rushing because you spent too much time on the super-hard ones, then you're less likely to make all of those careless mistakes!

(You're always going to make some careless mistakes - there's no way to avoid that. But you can minimize them via the choices you make about how you take the whole test.)

Another thing to keep in mind: in order to get the score that you want, you do NOT have to get the hardest questions right, because (if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing) the test will always give you some things that are harder than what you're trying to score. If you get more than a few of the lower level questions right, though - the ones you're "supposed" to get for the score that you want - then it's a lot less likely that you'll get the score you want.

Don't study for more than 2 hours at one sitting. If you want to study more on that day, take at least a 2 hour break and do something non-GMAT related before you start up again. Your brain actually does need time to process information into long-term memory. If you don't give it the chance to do this well / right, then your recall will not be what it should be.

Despite your limited time, I do think it's important to study what's in the books first, before you jump to OG questions. If you haven't actually learned the material, it's going to be harder to do the questions, plus you will be reinforcing your "old" way of doing things - so it will make it that much harder for you to learn the new approaches you see in the books.

Having said that, you can sometimes accelerate the process. If the material in a particular chapter is coming very naturally to you (and there are practice problems at the end of each chapter so you can test yourself on this), then by all means, speed up (in that chapter) and spend less time studying before you jump to the OG questions.