i received a PM about this question -- sorry for the delay, i am behind by hundreds of messages at this point.
Suz wrote:Hi.. I gave my second CAT(mgmat) and got a 660(45 Q, 35 V). My exam is exactly one month from now. Could you help me work on a game plan till my exam please? I'm aiming for a 750+ score-- is it possible in the given amount of time?
aiming for a score above 750 is pretty dicey. empirically -- that is, just looking at the results that people have gotten, not necessarily thinking about
why people have gotten those results -- we don't often see people getting into that range, unless their starting scores were already 700-ish or higher.
the good news, though, is that you don't *need* a score like that for admission into any school.
I've nearly done all the MGMAT strategy guides- and the corresponding OG 13 questions.I should also add that I'm not working at the moment.So I'm dedicating all my time to test prep.
this isn't really the kind of test to which you have to "dedicate all your time". in fact, on certain areas -- especially critical reasoning -- if you spend
too much time, the most likely effect is a
decrease in your score. (remember, critical reasoning requires you to
think about the situations with which you're presented. if you try to study too much, or too systematically, then your brain is going to try to start replacing actual thinking with "rules" -- and that's when the trouble starts.)
the sweet spot is usually anywhere from 5-15 hours per week of studying, depending on the individual. more than that isn't generally going to be any better, and may well be worse.
in general, make sure you have the following tools:
for SC:
there are only a few truly major topics tested:
* meaning, in general
* agreement (of various types -- subject/verb, pronoun/noun, plural things should be plural, etc.)
* parallelism
* modifier placement & usage
* overall sentence structure (avoiding run-on sentences and fragments)
if you can find these in general, you should be OK to ace most of the problems on SC.
for CR and RC:
* make sure you have a "fit on a business card" type of mental approach for each of the main question types.
for instance, for RC detail and inference questions, your "fit on a business card" approach could be:
... pick the choice that MUST be true
... don't use larger context
... find "search terms" in the question and stick to that part of the passage
etc. basically, if you can't clearly articulate a strategy for each question type in, say, 2-3 concise principles, then you need to build a more precise understanding.
for quant:
the vast majority of your ability to improve, if you are already at 45Q, is going to come from mental flexibility -- in particular, the ability to use methods other than traditional "textbook" methods to solve the problems.
you should master the following methods and use them often:
PS -- backsolving (working backward from answer choices)
PS -- plugging in your own values for undetermined quantities ("VIC" or "smart numbers" in our guides)
PS -- estimating answers
DS -- testing cases
together, these methods solve over half of all gmat math problems, so you should be all over that. if you are at 45Q then you know pretty much all the actual math that you need to know; you should concentrate almost exclusively on those strategies.
I'm worried about the IR section.I haven't done much for it- except attend one IR workshop and give a practice test with IR right now. But given the number of days I have, how much time should I dedicate to this section? I know this score is relatively unimportant right now- but I'll probably use my gmat score in another 3 years.
basically, just study IR enough to ...
... be
familiar with it (so that it doesn't freak you out)
... minimize the amount of effort that you have to spend on it
once you get to that point, there's not much of a reason to continue studying it.
