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Help! Study Strategy Question!

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Help! Study Strategy Question!

by vaj18psu » Wed Jan 09, 2013 4:47 pm
Developing my study plan to kick off my b-school journey.

I have pretty much exactly 3 months until I take the test, and I am between the two study methods below:

Option 1:
- Quant for the first month
- Verbal second month
- Comprehensive Review for the the last month

Option 2:
Take a practice every weekend, identify weakest area, and focus for the next week solely on that area (i.e. Sentence correction)
Take a practice test the following weekend, see if SC improved, and if it did, move on to next weakest area (for example, Geometry)

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:06 pm
Actually, I might suggest a little bit of a hybrid. I tend not to recommend doing spending more than 75% of your study time on one half of the exam than the other unless you know you're just lights-out great at one side, and even then it's advisable to spend at least some of your time staying fresh on your strong suit. What about in this case:

First Month: Alternate weeks between heavier quant and lighter verbal / heavier verbal and lighter quant. This way if you realize in week one that you just don't for the life of you get Sentence Correction, for example, you're not waiting an entire month to notice that.

The other nice thing about breaking it up is that you get to engage different parts of your mind and keep things fresh. In a way it's like working out and building different muscle groups...just the fact that you're studying a few different things means you can do more of it and still get good results because you're not wearing the same part of your mind down over and over.

Second Month (or maybe more like after 6 weeks of the general buildup): Now take a practice test either every weekend or every other, and use that to gauge where you should spend more time. Again, I wouldn't devote more than 3/4 or even really 2/3 of your time to any one weakness without spending some time on other question types.

Third Month: More of the same - by this point hopefully you're more fine tuning.


I think overall your two plans are pretty good...but merging them allows you to take the best of both ideas, and I'd definitely advise mixing quant and verbal in the same month at least and not just ignoring one entire half of the test for a full month.

Hope that helps!
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by brianlange77 » Mon Jan 14, 2013 8:54 pm
Hey Vaj:

Good to see you again. I agree with a lot of what Brian says below. Developing the study plan here is truly important and can make a real big difference in how you progress.

I'd encourage you to spend a few minutes reading Stacey's posts on the subject -- https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... an-part-1/
and https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... an-part-2/.

Think of it like water flowing through a funnel -- ultimately, you'll start out with a lot up top, but over time, you'll want to get more laser-focused on fewer/tighter topics, while checking your overall progress along the way.

Make sense? Let me know if you want to chat further.

Best of luck.

-Brian
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