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Completely change my GMAT study strategy?

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Completely change my GMAT study strategy?

by pando11 » Sun Aug 24, 2014 3:51 pm
Hi all,

I am taking a Manhattan GMAT prep course. At the beginning of course without study (end of June) I got a 590 with a 38 Quant and 34 Verbal. After two months of study (did roughly half the homework each week and went to all sessions) I ended up with the exact same score: 590 with 40 Quant and 32 Verbal. I am targeting 680-700.

I'm pretty frustrated because even though I did half the work I still covered a substantive amount of material and opted for focusing on it and taking notes and absorbing as opposed to skimming over two months - my score did not budge. I focused mostly on math and not as much on Verbal. When I skipped the Verbal SGs and did the practice problems in the GMAT Review, I got high accuracy on the practice problems.

Should I change my strategy? I have about three sessions left and was aiming for early Oct (three weeks after classes end). But I am thinking now is instead focusing on weaknesses and only on verbal and getting that up to a 40 range which would get me to my target score. I feel like I am at the max highest with my math since I am not as strong at math.
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by Jim@StratusPrep » Mon Aug 25, 2014 3:32 am
I don't think you should completely abandon your quant efforts - it takes time to see a change. You definitely want to study verbal as well.

When you say you did half of the work, do you mean only half of the practice problems? The problems are where you are going to see the biggest benefit.
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by [email protected] » Mon Aug 25, 2014 2:29 pm
Hi pando11,

I have some questions about your studies that should help to clarify your situation:

1) Are the 2 CATs you mentioned the only 2 that you've taken? If there are others, then what were the scores?

2) When you reviewed these CATs, how often were you getting questions wrong because of a silly/minor mistake and how often were you getting questions wrong because they were just too hard? To hit your goal score, you really have to eliminate as many of the silly mistakes as possible.

The nature of a CAT (or the Official GMAT) is that it adds some extra "stress" elements - the countdown clock and the overall endurance/fatigue aspect of the full exam. Since your practice scores are so similar, it's highly likely that your "stress reaction" was to revert to how you were performing before you started studying - in essence, you forgot/abandoned your training. Since you've been scoring well on practice problems, those skills should transfer over, but they haven't yet.

Moving forward, additional practice is obviously necessary (since you've barely touched the Verbal material yet). By your own admission, you've only done half the work, so we can't overlook that either - maybe you haven't immersed yourself enough to have earned those missing points. With an early October Test Date, you still have plenty of time to study, so you don't necessarily have to make any big changes yet. You should plan on taking a FULL LENGTH practice CAT every 1-2 weeks. Report back with your scores and we can go from there.

As an aside, raising your Verbal to a 40 (or so) is not going to be enough to help you hit your goal. You'll have to raise your Quant too (a Q38 would be something of a minor "red flag" at Top Business Schools).

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Rich
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