i have two very concrete suggestions that may help you in your preparation.
the first suggestion concerns the mental state in which you're completing the practice problems.
if you're feeling depressed, then you could definitely benefit from the following change of perspective:
learn to regard failures on practice problems as opportunities rather than as actual failures.
here's what i mean: every time you miss a practice problem, you're learning something: specifically, you're learning about some specific item that's missing from your foundation of knowledge. without making such mistakes, you won't know which subjects you should study and learn more about - so you should actually appreciate the mistakes you make!
it's not enough just to adopt the new attitude, though; you also have to dedicate yourself to deriving LESSONS from every single problem.
do not leave a problem until you have gotten some sort of TAKEAWAY from that problem - a takeaway that you can APPLY TO OTHER PROBLEMS.
such takeaways could take many forms. for instance, they could have to do with the particular strategy you should employ on a given type of problem. they could have to do with charts/tables/devices you could have used to organize your thoughts better. they could even be silly mistakes / traps that you should learn to watch out for. in any case, though, you should be able to derive some sort of takeaway from EVERY problem; that is in fact the only really good reason to do practice problems in the first place.
and that leads into the next topic, which is your comment that problem solving "still feels like (you) have never done this before". if that's the case, then you are probably not studying correctly. here is what you should be doing:
when you study problems, don't concentrate on the individual problems. instead, focus on the COMMON THREADS and CONNECTIONS between the problems.
remember that you're never going to see the actual problems you're studying, ever again, but you will see problems that look a lot like them. so, more than emphasizing the particulars of the problem in front of you, you should be emphasizing considerations such as:
* what are the signals in this problem that tell me what problem type it is?
* what sort of strategies have worked on similar problems?
* what factors have caused me to miss similar problems in the past?
if you start studying problems in this way - with an eye to their connections to other problems, rather than considering them as individual disconnected problems - you'll find that the sense of "still feeling new" will go away.
there's a saying about improvisational acting that says, roughly, that good improv requires years of preparation. it's a funny and ironic comment, but it reveals a truth about improv: namely, the best improv isn't improvisational at all. instead, the actor has been in hundreds of similar situations before, and so has developed instincts that will guide him/her through the current situation smoothly.
your goal is to create a similar situation on the gmat: you should study enough connections and takeaways that you eventually get to the point at which most, if not all, of the problems look like things that you've already seen.
when you get to that point of "constant deja vu", you'll be ready to roll.
good luck!
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.
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