rob10989 wrote:Would you suggest retaking sooner rather than later? I think I am going to plan to retake the test in mid-late July - do you think that is enough time between tests?
My preferred way is to set a goal and wait to schedule the test for then you have some visibility regarding when you will hit the goal. In other words, if your goal is 740+ with Q47+, then when you start scoring at or near that on practice tests and feel as if you have things under control, you would schedule a test for a few weeks out.
Some people prefer to schedule the test and put themselves to make the deadline, and of course for a $50 fee you can always push it back if you decide at least a week before that you need more time.
Given how close you seem to be, late July sounds good, as long as you feel that you are ready to get back on that horse pretty soon and finish the job. I could see solidly hitting your goal taking maybe five or six weeks though. Not an easy call for me to make though, obviously, given my limited awareness of what you have had going on.
As far as continuing to prepare goes, it sounds as if you have covered pretty much everything. Now, you have to shift to performance based training. You have to go over those practice tests and see what have to be better at in order to hit your goal. Then address what you find, aspect by aspect, topic by topic.
You know there are some types of quant questions which you are not as comfortable with as you are with others. Become an expert at handling those types and you can be pretty sure that your quant score will be higher next time.
You can set up a free practice account here,
https://bellcurves.com, and work on quant questions type by type. Working type by type is the way to learn to totally destroy GMAT quant. By the end of July you could score Q49+ training that way.
Also, maybe your accuracy in quant is not consistent enough. That would explain the surprise in your quant section score. So when you are doing quant questions in practice, make sure to focus on getting a high hit rate, at least 80 - 90%. Some of those BellCurve questions have issues. So if you use that question bank probably you won't achieve a 100% or even 90% hit rate, but you get what I am saying.
Do something similar in verbal. Go over your practice tests and figure out what about your processes could be better and make them more solid. Also, when you are doing verbal questions, really seek to clearly understand why each wrong answer choice is wrong and each right answer choice is right. You can take all kinds of time per question when you are practicing, seeking to develop an eye for what you have to see in order to be more consistent in verbal. Generally it's better to take a half hour on a CR question and get it right than to take two minutes and get it wrong. You have to develop skill in seeing what you need to see, and as you get better at handling the questions, you will naturally speed up.
You can find out more about all of this stuff by continuing to look around in these forums.
By doing topic by topic work in quant, keeping accuracy in mind, and by working on more clearly seeing what you have to see to get verbal questions right, I think that you can get your score to a significantly higher level within about a month, maybe a little sooner, maybe a little later.
