GMAT Strategy

Hi all,

I am a big fan of this forum as all of your information has helped me a lot. I have been prepping for the GMAT for about 1 month now. Today I took the first of my GMAT Prep tests. As I was going through the test I felt it was difficult and began to lose hope. At the end I was VERY SHOCKED to see a score of 700. I have heard about the scoring bugs and other possible scoring errors so I wanted to know if this sounds pretty accurate.

Q49 - Got 9 questions wrong, mostly in the middle/beginning.
Specifically - I got numbers 3,7, 12, 13, 14, 16, 28, 29, and 36 wrong. As you can see most of my errors were in the 12-16 range.

V36 - Got 12 questions wrong, also mostly in the middle/beginning.
Specifically I got numbers 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 24, 31 and 41 wrong. Crammed in the middle again.

I have heard that the beginning questions count more than the ending ones. Seeing as how most of my errors were in the middle, does this score seem plausible? Also, if i study hard for the next 4-5 weeks, can I expect a similar score on the actual GMAT? I'm just anxious about the test so I want to cover all corners.

Thanks in advance

GMAT Prep tests are the most accurate out there, so yes, you can trust your score. As for getting that same score on the real GMAT, no one can say. My experience with many, many students has been that they tend to score +/- 50 points from their final practice test. So, if you took the test today, you'd likely score somewhere between 650 and 750. As you illustrated, you can get quite a few questions wrong and still score well.

Thank you, that is very helpful. I was just worried since a lot of my errors were in the middle of both sections. Also, if you don't mind, what can I do to improve my data sufficiency skills since 44% of my quant errors were DS. I've searched a lot but most of the strategies are similar to Kaplan's. I believe my problem with data sufficiency is that I cannot decipher what information I would need to solve the problem from the question stem, unless it's something easy like percentages. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You!