GMAT Strategy

Received a PM asking me to respond.

In general, you seem to be in good shape: you're taking the practice tests under full official conditions and you're scoring in the high 600s already. Obviously, you're trying to do this in a seriously short period of time but, so far, so good.

(FYI: the current break is 10 min between sections, and there was a report recently that they may be changing that break to 8min instead of 10.)

Do you know WHY you have the weaknesses you have? How is your timing balanced between DS and PS? (I ask because I often have students tell me they're worse at DS, and when I look at their tests, I'll see that they're spending a lot more time on PS, on average. Naturally, that means they have to work a lot more quickly on DS, so then their performance drops on PS. Make sure that's not what's happening to you!)

Ditto on verbal - make sure that a weakness is really a weakness and not just a timing problem, and make sure that weaknesses are not exacerbated by timing problems.

What are you using to teach you how to answer CR questions? Ditto for DS - what are you using that teaches you the actual math, first of all, as well as the process for DS? If you don't have sources already identified, do so ASAP. OG is fantastic in terms of practicing questions, but it doesn't do a very good job of teaching you how to get better.

GMATPrep is great because it uses real past test questions, but it gives you no data in terms of your strengths and weaknesses, and it doesn't track your per-question timing. You may want to switch one of your upcoming GMATPrep tests to another MGMAT test (maybe the 4th one) so that you can pick apart the data and make it work for you. For instance, I'm guessing that, right now, you don't know whether timing might be an issue for you on DS - that is, whether you might be going a little too quickly on average, which would of course affect your performance. But you'll be able to tell after your first MGMAT test because you'll be able to see the data.

The final week is generally better spent on overall review - you actually don't typically learn an absolute ton in the last week, and you don't want to be learning new techniques 4 days before, because that's not enough time to learn to use the techniques really effectively before you take the test. You don't list RC as a weakness, so I'll assume it's your strongest area. Given your very short timeframe, you might want to drop the overall RC review and just do an overall review during that last week.

Looks like Quant is going really well - consistent, and high, results. Keep doing what you're doing there, paying particular attention to balancing your timing. It's not worth it to spend more than about 2.5m on any quant question, because you're almost guaranteeing yourself some other question wrong as a result. Most of the time, you choose to spend too much time on really hard questions and the other one(s) you get wrong as a result tend to be easier ones on which you rush because you need to catch up... and then you make a careless mistake. It's worse to get the easier ones wrong than the hard ones, so that's not a good trade-off.

(And, of course, when you identify weak areas or things you don't know, go and review those things.)

The verbal results were a bit different. Is that where you saw the 2 repeated questions on GMATPrep? Wondering if your score was slightly inflated from that.

If possible, try to figure out why your MGMAT performance was so much lower than your GMATprep performance. That could have to do with your timing during the section, having too many wrong questions in a row on one test, your stamina, the time of day you took the test, whether you took the two tests too close together in time, the number of repeated questions you say on GMATPrep and how you handled them, or even just the random unluckiness of getting more questions in your weaker areas on one test vs. another test.

So take a look through and think about those things - let us know why you think the MGMAT test was tougher for you.

You'll never totally eliminate careless mistakes, but it is worth it to spend some try thinking about how to minimize them. Whenever you notice you've made a careless mistake, think about (a) what mistake you made, (b) WHY you made it, and (c) what habit you could make or what habit you have to break to minimize the chances of repeating that kind of error.

Ditto when you get something wrong due to actual problems with content or understanding (in other words, it wasn't just a careless mistake). What didn't you know or understand that you needed to know or understand? If it was something you just didn't know, study that thing. If it was something you misunderstood, WHY did you misunderstand it? Then you can figure out how to avoid such misunderstandings in the future.

At the level you're aiming for, it's also a good idea to spend some time analyzing wrong answers in verbal, especially for your weaker areas.

Ask yourself:
- why was the wrong answer so tempting? why did it look like it might be right? (be as explicit as possible)
- why was it actually wrong? what specific words indicate that it is wrong and how did I overlook those clues the first time?
- why did the right answer seem wrong? what made it so tempting to cross off the right answer? why were those things actually okay - what was my error in thinking that they were wrong?
- why was it actually right?

You can also do the above exercise with problems you get right - just pick whatever you think is the most tempting wrong answer and go through the list of questions.

Keep up the good work!