GMAT Strategy

Hi - I write this post with a lot of despair and confusion about the progress of my GMAT preparation. I wrote the GMAT in Jan 2007 and scored a dismal 640 (Q45 V32) and put the MBA dream on hold as I had moved to another country and started a new career. Now after 4.5 years I have started the prep again but despite practicing for 2 months my scores have stagnated, so I'm reaching out to the experts, peers and GMAT stars who can help me understand what I'm doing wrong?

I have an engineering background and as for any engineer I've been concentrating more on my Verbal and I do see a 2-5 point improvement from my earlier GMAT attempt but I'm still not reaching the high 600's or touching 700 and I can't figure why?


I have been studying and referencing from the sources below:

Kaplan Premier 2011
Manhattan SC
Powerscore CR - Did not complete it but use it as Reference
Official Guide 12
Official Guide Verbal
Official Guide Quant
Awesome's Error Log - To track my areas of weakness

My accuracy

OG12 (Completed all questions below)
- PS: 84%
- DS: 79%
- CR: 80%
- SC: 77%

Here are the practice tests that I've taken so far:

Kaplan CD: 640 (Q42 V39)
Kaplan CAT1: 610 (Q39 V34)
GMAT Prep 1: 620 (Q43 V33)
MGMAT 1: 560 (Q32 V35) Major timing issue in Quant so pretty much lost complete focus
MGMAT 2: 670 (Q46 V35) Ran out of time by 35th in Quant
MGMAT 3: 640 (Q43 V35) Again barely made it till the last question

My GMAT was scheduled for next week but now I have rescheduled it for September end and looking for insight from BTG to help me or point me in the right direction as I've run out of ideas in terms of strategy to ace this beast!

Thanks,

- Amit

Keep going back to your mistakes and learn from them. GMAT will test the same concepts in different ways so understand the underlying concept of a problem.
Number of problems will not help, you need to review what ever you have done, every mistake. Try doing a problem in different ways.

I think that should help, since you are at the fag end of your journey.

Wish you all the luck!!

Once I'm done with the MGMAT what practice test do you recommend? Does BeattheGmat have any practice CATs?

1. Give GMATprep 3 times each so that you can extract the max questions out of it. Some will repeat but still they are the best questions.
2. Every company has a free practice test, PR, Knewton, Kaplan u can give one each. Don't look at the practice test for the scores but to learn and improve timing.

I dont think BTG has tests, apart from MGMAT if you are hell bent on buying tests get Kaplan's but they skew your score down (that is the general opinion.)

Yup totally agree about Kaplan CATs - 1st CAT made no sense so I quit the Kaplan series and switched to MGMAT.

Any other feedback from experts? Any strategies to go after errors?

Experts still looking for guidance?