i received a PM regarding this thread.
i will avoid telling you that you should hire a tutor, because, well, i'm a tutor, and i don't want to give biased (and annoying) advice. like when you see lawyers' advertisements saying, "you need a lawyer!" well, of course
they would say that.
tutoring
might be helpful, but it also might not.
if you are not enough of a self-starter (or are too busy, or too stressed) to glean The Truth from the zillions and zillions of instructor posts on these forums, then tutoring could be massively helpful. on the other hand, if you already understand the basic philosophy of the exam and you have enough time (and motivation) to distill the most important essentials from what's here, then you may not need a private tutor.
there are also other variables. (1) do you learn better alone, or do you learn more socially? (2) if you are busy, will you be more likely to carve out the time and actually DO THE WORK if you are beholden to a tutor?
etc. etc.
there's no simple answer. tutoring is expensive, so, ideally, you should figure out whether it's a good decision
before you take the plunge, not after.
aaaaaaaaaanyway...
bond0007 wrote:Just took GMAT Friday and scored 600 (q40,v33). My 2 latest practice tests prior to that were 660 (Q42,V39) and 630 (Q39,V37. I took the test during a heatwave and the AC in the center was broken, also my computer crashed in the middle of the test :(
if you think that irregularities like these caused a low score, you can file a complaint and have the score cancelled retroactively. (not after this much time has passed, but you can do that within a certain window of time, like 24 hours or something.)
Anyways I'm not going to let that get me down, I just scheduled a retake for exactly 1 month from now since I'm still in the study mode. I'm shooting for a 650-680 so I know it's DOABLE!! I have the following prep material at my disposal (I have gone through all except OG13): All MGMAT books, Access to Online MGMAT classes, OG 12&13,OG Q&V Supplements, Powerscore CR, Kaplan Gmat800.
that's too much material. you basically shouldn't need much besides the OG at this point.
by the way, you should avoid the SC problems in kaplan 800. essentially every single problem that has been posted here from that source has had very serious issues.
Please let me know what the best way to prep would be, given that I have 30 days til my exam. Should I go through all the MGMAT guides again and OG13 or should I focus on doing every problem from OG13 and going over the answer strategies for each problem?
there's a lot of stuff you can do with the OG problems.
even if you've seen the problems before (about 80% of OG13 problems are in OG12), they still have a great deal of value. there's still a ton of review that you can do -- review that extends well beyond just solving the problem and understanding why the correct answer is correct.
* on quant, you should try to find every way you can possibly find to solve the problems. backsolving, plugging in your own values, etc. are paramount.
clearly, you aren't going to find more than one way to solve the problem during the practice test itself, but, in your review, you should be able to find multiple approaches to MOST problems. so, that's a substantial added component of review.
* on sentence correction, you should insert the correct answer into the sentence, and then justify EVERY weird-looking or unfamiliar construction in the sentence -- regardless of whether the constructions are actually in the underlined portion of the sentence. e.g., if you see any modifier, anywhere, then spell out exactly what it modifies and exactly why that's ok. etc.
* on critical reasoning, you should try to make your own analogy arguments that use the same type of logic as the official question (but with different topic material). also, on any strengthening/weakening/evaluation/explanation type problem (together that's like 85% of all the questions), you should be able tomake up your own correct answer that works in some way that's different from how the given correct answer works.
here are some other posts you can read:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/retaking-gma ... tml#464164
https://www.beatthegmat.com/where-am-i-g ... tml#443962
https://www.beatthegmat.com/stuck-at-quo ... tml#413529
good luck.
