GMAT Strategy

This is horrible.. I took my first ever gmat practice test (MGMAT) and scored a 440..... 21 quant and 29 verbal.

Just to make myself feel better:

I took the test at 2am after a rigorous gym workout. This was a cold attempt to see where I am starting off since I haven't even opened the study books yet and besides looking at 10 or so problems,never really looked at a full Gmat exam to see I can expect.

I have at least 6 months of free study time as I do not have a full time job(run my own biz with partner) and I will be signing up to the Manhattan GMAT course at the end of this month.

I NEED to get as close to 700 as possible as I plan on applying to the top 20 schools. ( i have a somewhat unique background)


I would appreciate any advice!!!!

already bought the cracking the gmat and kaplan 800

make sure you get the OG, practise all the questions in it and most importantly, spend atleast 5 minutes learning each and every question.

that is enought to reach 650

Since practice exams are a limited resource, I suggest taking them at a normal time of the day (and best case scenario: at the time of you plan to take the actual exam).

Uplifting information: A friend of mine scored in the 400s on his first practice exam. He scored a 730 on the actual exam (first attempt).

Best of luck and I am happy to answer any other questions.

Also, no offense, but you may want to be careful with post titles going forward. There might be some people who would help you if not for the title. And a lot of people on this site have great advice, so you don't want to turn any of them off.

thanks for the words of encouragement guys.

I have to give props to MGMAT for their test analysis where I can see what I need help with.


My #1 weakness is DATA sufficiency where i got only 3/15 questions correct. I have NEVER seen this format on a test so I was really confused.

#2 weakness is basic high school math for which I forgot a lot of the algebra, and geometry stuff.

#3 would be critical reasoning followed by reading comp, and sent corr.

I feel that a 250+ point gain over the next 4 months is really doable if I remain focused on beating my biggest weaknesses.

I have good news and bad news...

I just took a Princeton Review test and got a 470. This is after a week of studying math with just a Princeton review book.

The good news is that my Quant score went from 21 to 32.(very happy to see improvement on what I worked)
the bad news is that my verbal dropped to a 23 from 29.

I already know why this happened. I took too long on verbal and ran out of time I had to just guess on many questions. I havent studied verbal but I am confident I will raise my score to atleast a 45 in verbal after I study for it.