GMAT Strategy

I have been studying this whole week for over 8 hours per day. And now that I opened one set of MGMAT CAT test, it seemed like I couldn't solve any of the questions!! Being Frustrated, utterly disappointed I canceled my exam

I just don't know where to start from again! Anybody pls suggest, which of the mock tests should I start doing now? Is it me who's finding MGMAT tests are harder or is it just I studied too much!!??

I started studying about 2 weeks ago, and I wish I would have know to purchase the OG first and do all of the questions in it first. I have been frustrated by the other books I started with.

The OG (11th Ed) starts with easy questions and get progressively harder so you can learn from your mistakes as you go. I should be done with the book in a week, and then I plan on hitting some other books. I hear Kaplan is very hard, not sure about the MGMAT...

MGMAT has probably (and most on the forum will agree) the second best practice tests (GMATPREP #1 of course). I am no expert, but I believe 8 hours a day is not helpful. Rule of thumb on this forum is QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. 2 hours a day should be much sufficient to learn concepts and fundamentals. Its a long road....trust me I know. Do not get frustrated...its part of the game. If it was easy, everyone would be scoring 800. Take the disappointments as potential for growth. I did and it makes a whole lot of difference..

Stick in there...

mgmat math are ridiculous. I tried couple of their cat test and there questions are not representation of the real gmat questions. it is way to time consuming. ur best bet is doing Og first then perhaps try it again

smclean23 wrote:MGMAT has probably (and most on the forum will agree) the second best practice tests (GMATPREP #1 of course). I am no expert, but I believe 8 hours a day is not helpful. Rule of thumb on this forum is QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. 2 hours a day should be much sufficient to learn concepts and fundamentals. Its a long road....trust me I know. Do not get frustrated...its part of the game. If it was easy, everyone would be scoring 800. Take the disappointments as potential for growth. I did and it makes a whole lot of difference..

Stick in there...

Actually I have started preparing myself for over a month now. I covered all OG 11, Kaplan 800, Princeton Review, MGMAT books and part of OG 10. I went through the MGMAT SC, RC and CR too incld. Spidey's notes. I wanted to make sure that I leave out no single concepts to learn. I have been pushing myself too much so that I do really well in the practice tests. But now that I am done with all the concepts last night and when I opened the MGMAT test, it seemed like the questions were way lot harder than I thought. I could have guessed the answers and moved. I didn't wanna do it, instead took very long time to finish the first 5 questions, where 3 of them came out wrong!! That's when my frustration point came and I quit the test!!

Any solution now from where to start again!!???!!!

Don't be disheartened mate!

If you go through the "I Beat the GMAT" section of the forum, you will find a girl who hit 710 or 720, I can't remember exactly and she said that she never got higher then 630-640 in MGMAT. She even did an untimed exam and still only got a 670-680 so unless you know and understand the MGMAT Math tricks you will feel the pain.

MGMAT's thinking is that if you can do well at their exam you will be a whiz during the actual(GMAT) exam as you are so used to doing alot of (hard) calculations fast. That may be true for some and clearly for others its depressing. I have heard various instructors mention that you should not get yourself so down over the prep exams, rather learn from your mistakes. Yeah I agree but I feel in life your attitude/confidence play just as much of an equal role to your knowledge and doing well at an exam does wonders for your confidence. (Someone is going to come back and say that it may be false hope .... yeah well thats why I stick with Gmat Prep exams)

smclean - I agree with you that Quality is MUCH more important then Quantity BUT everyone's different. You may be blessed with the ability to sit for two hours and really soak it up whereas for some of us like me would probably only get about 20-25 questions done a night. It takes me about 4-5 minutes because I spend 2 minutes doing, 1-2 minutes reviewing all the answers, 1 minute tracking/logging my findings. I'm slow.

Ok back to question 21.

Sumi

8 hours a day? That's WAY too much. That's part of your problem. Brain overload!

Well, you could try going through the test again and just do the best you can on it, and treat the problems you didn't know how to do or just got wrong as further opportunities to learn rather than obstacles of frustration. Figure out just why you didn't know how to do the problem. Is it because you didn't see the approach? Did you not know a formula? Were you just too tired and distracted?

Just yesterday I was going through some of the OG problems and there was one that I just could not figure out no matter what I tried to do, so I skipped it and moved on to the next problem in the set. After I completed the set of problems, I went back and checked my answers and later that day, started working through the problems again to analyze my errors and to figure out if there was a better way of doing some of the problems that I got right, but took too long to do.

I got to that very same problem and completed it in less than 30 seconds. I had not yet looked at the answer description, but just having let it go for a while caused me to realize that I did know how to do that problem after all.

My humble advice is HANG IN THERE RABAB!!

God only know how many times i have cancelled out of their question banks; reread the concepts and have goneback and finsihed them.

MGMAT CAT/questions in general are tough but discoverring the concepts behind the questions/gainign the knowledge in the process truly doesl equip u to better on the GMAT. Strictly my opinion.

Keep your confidence up and I am sure u will do better on these once u familiarize urself more with the actual topics.

Good luck!!!

Tough in the sense of time management. I have heard and experienced this personally. Good thing is u will find on average(dont quote me on this) 5 -10 questiosn atleast in the 700-800 level and there lies the answer to why it takes more time.