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Need expert advice.....

by foreigneryes » Tue Jun 29, 2010 10:52 am
So I studied for my GMAT for about a month and a half and used Princeton Review's "Cracking the GMAT" and their online CAT's as well as GMAT Prep's CAT's.

As a side note, I only need around a 470 just to be able to get into my chosen school.

Anyway, I was getting a predictive score of about 380-390. I was unsure what I was doing wrong but thought if I just kept practicing with the exam itself, I would score higher.

Needless to say, my exam was this past Friday and the predictions came true. I scored a 380 (q20, v23) on the exam.

I am stuck now and am unsure of my next step. I want to try some classes but am unsure which ones or even if I need them, not to mention how expensive everything gets.

Anybody have any advice for me? :shock:
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by Dan@VinciaPrep » Wed Jun 30, 2010 1:31 am
foreigneryes wrote:So I studied for my GMAT for about a month and a half and used Princeton Review's "Cracking the GMAT" and their online CAT's as well as GMAT Prep's CAT's.

As a side note, I only need around a 470 just to be able to get into my chosen school.

Anyway, I was getting a predictive score of about 380-390. I was unsure what I was doing wrong but thought if I just kept practicing with the exam itself, I would score higher.

Needless to say, my exam was this past Friday and the predictions came true. I scored a 380 (q20, v23) on the exam.

I am stuck now and am unsure of my next step. I want to try some classes but am unsure which ones or even if I need them, not to mention how expensive everything gets.

Anybody have any advice for me? :shock:
How long do you have left to study? How much more effort are you willing to make? Although a score of 470 doesn't seem very high- it still will take a fair amount of effort considering your starting point.
If my post helped you- let me know by pushing the thanks button ;)

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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Wed Jun 30, 2010 10:17 am
Thanks for your message, foreignereyes - I'm sorry to hear about a frustrating test day for you, but encouraged by your attitude and willingness to work for a higher score!

A few pieces of advice for you as you relaunch your studies:

1) While it's fresh in your mind, see if you can make a list of the questions that you knew gave you trouble on Friday, and try to categorize them as:

-Didn't understand the skills to solve them
-Didn't know what they were asking of me
-Knew what I was doing but took too long
-(any other designations that you can think of)

Getting an idea of where you need to improve is helpful - if it turns out that you saw, say, many more inequality problems than you anticipated and you just didn't know what to do, you can emphasize that concept. If you felt overwhelmed by Data Sufficiency as a question type, you can work on that. Just knowing that you have a handful of emphasis areas can be a way to make the studies more tangible and effective.

2) Go back to your old practice tests and list out reasons for questions that you got wrong. Are they:

-Didn't understand the necessary skills?
-Knew what I was doing but made one costly mistake? (If so, list the mistake you made...this is really important)
-Took too much time and guessed?
-Narrowed it down to two and guessed?
-(Again, other designations that you can think of that came up multiple times for you)

Once you've identified some areas for improvement, you can work on those and watch yourself make tangible progress. I'm a huge believer that it's not too hard to minimize your most common mistakes once you've identified them (things like answering the wrong question - solving for y instead of x, perhaps - or making assumptions about variables), so I'd make that a top priority first.

As far as taking a class, I'm pretty biased, so I may let the community weigh in on all of your options. We do have a couple of free, live-online events going on over the next week, though, if you'd like to learn more about Veritas Prep and get some access to our strategies and curriculum. Tomorrow night (July 1) I'm hosting a free trial class of our Combinatorics and Probability lesson, and on July 7 (a week from tonight) I'll be hosting one of our standard free seminars (that one may be most useful to you given your starting point), and I'd love to have you attend either or both. Those events are linked to the right hand side of all of the BTG pages if you'd like to register.
Brian Galvin
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Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep

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