GMAT Strategy

Hi Sudipt23,

Congratulations on all of your hard work building content knowledge so far! Here are some tips for your upcoming test.

1. Anxiety can be debilitating and hurt your score - or it can be a helpful tool to boost your score, if you view it in the right frame of mind. The feeling of nervous excitement that you get before a test, an important sporting event, or a major life event serves to focus your attention. You get that feeling of hyper-awareness and energy. Too much of that feeling, though, can cause panic, which impedes your ability to to focus. So, to channel that good excitement rather than creating counterproductive panic, here are a few things you should do:

- Plan to take the test twice. You're taking it in late November, but tell yourself that you'll take it again in late December (that's plenty of time for most 2nd round deadlines), no matter what the outcome this time. Unless you get a 750+, there's always the opportunity to improve a second time. That takes a lot of pressure off of you to get a perfect score the first time.

- Be ok with getting things wrong! The test is designed to feel hard for everyone, which means that everyone (even the experts!) get questions wrong. When you get to a question and think "oh no! I have no idea how to solve this," just tell yourself, "that's ok, that's supposed to happen on certain questions." Guess and move on without feeling bad about it.

- Remind yourself of the enormous amount that you know before going into the test. Review all of the rules to reinforce the feeling of "yeah, I know this stuff," but also remind yourself of all of your successes on the really hard problems. You know more than you think!

2. As for practice tests, don't go overboard! You shouldn't take more than 2 in a 10 day period. Practice tests serve to tell you how much you've learned, but they don't really create the learning themselves. Take one test, then review it in depth (you should spend more time reviewing that you spend taking the test in the first place). Spend some time thinking about how you could have improved your technique on each question. Then spend some time digging into any topics that need work.

Be especially aware of your time management. If you've only taken 2 CATs so far, you probably haven't exactly mastered a perfect timing balance. Make sure you're tracking your timing throughout each CAT.

Most importantly - don't burn yourself out in these last 10 days. Being well-rested and relaxed will do more to improve your score than getting extra hours of studying in but sacrificing sleep.

Good luck!

Here are some more tips for managing test anxiety:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/artic ... niques.cfm
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/artic ... s-tips.cfm
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/ ... mat-score/

Good luck!

Here's a good general rule for timing: check in with yourself at the one-minute mark and ask yourself "do I know what this is asking, and do I have a CLEAR sense of how to solve it?" If the answer to that question is "no" or "I'm not sure," then you guess and move on at that point. If you don't really know what to do in one minute, it's unlikely that you'll know what to do in 3 minutes. On something that you're likely to get wrong anyway, get it wrong quickly and spend that extra time elsewhere!

That's different from questions like longer word problems, where you say to yourself "I know exactly how to solve this, but it's going to take a long time." For those, glance at the clock first. If you're ahead of time, go ahead and attempt the problem. If you're behind time, either a) skip the problem, or b) it you're SURE you'll get in right, go for it, but tell yourself that you'll have to skip something else soon.

MGMAT tests are great because there are answer explanations and you can run assessment reports on your data, so I'd recommend that 2 of your 3 be MGMAT (although as I said, 3 tests might be too many, if you don't have time to review really deeply). Your last CAT should be a GMATPrep one, though. Even though the MGMAT CATs are great, it's helpful to take the one written by the actual test writers. You can then search on BTG for answer explanations.

Good luck!

Here's more on time management:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/ ... anagement/
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/ ... nt-part-2/

HI sudipt23,

Ceilidh has made a number of good points in her posts, so I won't rehash any of that here. Looking at your practice scores, you're actually REALLY close to scoring 650 right now. As such, you should take a good look at each of the questions that you got wrong on these practice CATs and try to define WHY you got them wrong. How many times did you make a silly/little mistake? How often did you narrow the answers down to 2 choices but still get the question wrong anyway? Fixing these little mistakes should help you to earn back the missing points that you're looking for.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi sudipt23,

When you say that you got 3 RC Qs, do you mean that you saw 3 different RC passages (with a set of questions for each) in the first 15 questions?

That's highly unlikely to occur on the Official GMAT, but I suppose that it's mathematically possible. The Randomizer can spit out questions in strange combinations sometimes (I had a Client once tell me that on Test Day his first 10 Quant questions were DS questions, but he kept his cool, remembered his training and scored 730). Typically, you'll see an RC passage within every 10 questions or so, with a combination of CR and SC questions separating each RC passage.

The definition of the word "long" is debatable when it comes to RC passages. Three to four paragraphs is normally considered "mid-length." Four big paragraphs or 5 paragraphs would be considered "long." One big paragraph or two small paragraphs would be considered "short." Remember though that a longer passage doesn't necessarily mean that the passage/questions will be that hard - it means that you'll probably need more time to initially read the passage.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

sudipt23 wrote:Hi guys,

Would really appreciate some help with pacing strategy and guessing on the verbal section.

At the moment, my average pacing and accuracy over 3 mock tests looks this:(am struggling to complete the last 11 Q's)

Q 01-10: 24 mins : 60%
Q 11-20: 26 mins : 50%
Q 21-30: 16 mins : 57%
Q 30-41: 10 mins : 63%

Thanks a lot.

I suggest that you use the following Milestone Charts to keep you on track:

We (at GMAT Prep Now) feel that these times are easily remembered so you can quickly jot them on your noteboard on test day.

This (and optimal guessing strategies) is covered in our free GMAT time management video at https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1244

Cheers,
Brent

Hi sudipt23,

You're broken down your Verbal section into "sets" of questions, but you might need to be a bit more specific. Your pacing problem might be due to a specific question type (or sub-category within a type), so some deeper analysis would probably be beneficial.

Most SCs are meant to be answered in 60-90 seconds.
Most CRs are meant to be answered in about 2 minutes.

On your last CAT, how many times did you spend MORE than the recommended time on SCs and CRs?

If you can determine WHY you're spending that extra time, then you might be able to make some adjustments to how you work through those questions, speed up a bit and fix your overall pacing problem.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich