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Study Help Needed

by jscpba » Sat Jan 22, 2011 12:29 pm
I will be sitting for the GMAT in just over one month. I am confused on where I should focus my study over the next four weeks to best imporve my score. Here is what I've done and the books that I have:

MGMAT Guides
OG 12

GMATPrep CAT 1 (took it cold as a benchmark) = 470 (didn't note the breakdown)

I started by going through the MGMAT Foundations of Math Book and then took my first MGMAT CAT

MGMAT CAT 1= 530 (30Q 33V)

I went through some of the MGMAT quant guides for a week and took my next CAT.

MGMAT CAT 2= 630 (43Q 35V)

From here my study was interrupted by extenuating family circumstances. I didn't study for 2 weeks!! I was very frustrated and wanted to take another CAT to see how much worse I would do.

MGMAT CAT 3= 540 ( 33Q 32V)

I was extremely frustrated, and at this point I began my internship with a boutique investment bank. I decided to do some quant problems from OG12 each night after work. This leads me into the CAT I just finished.

MGMAT CAT 4= 640 (39Q 38V)

I feel like I am back to where I was before I had to stop studying.

Do you guys have any suggestions for how I should spend my last four weeks studying? What would be the most efficient plan of attack? Thanks for all the help in advance! Also, do you think it is unreasonable to think I could score 660-700 in a month?
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by bblast » Sat Jan 22, 2011 7:54 pm
if u honestly timed the mgmat cat and scored a 640 then trust me u can get a 650+ in a month's time,. gi through mgmat math guides, do og twice for quant.

take up og-10 for SC practise, and u will be good to go, use the BTG forums for aditional practise
Cheers !!

Quant 47-Striving for 50
Verbal 34-Striving for 40

My gmat journey :
https://www.beatthegmat.com/710-bblast-s ... 90735.html
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upz46D7 ... TWBZF14TKW_
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by jscpba » Sun Jan 23, 2011 12:53 pm
Thanks for the tips! Does anyone else have any suggestions?
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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Mon Jan 24, 2011 11:55 am
Hey jscpba,

First off, it's great to hear that you're back in action, and hopefully all the intervening issues are now going well!

Honestly, it's tough to give you any prescriptions based just on your scores, but I guess that leads me to my suggestion:

Analyze those practice tests!!

Try to determine, based on the mistakes that you made, questions that you missed, and time that you spent:

1) Which concept areas or question types do you need to emphasize? If you not that you missed, say, quite a few Number Properties questions or Sentence Correction questions, then you'll want to prioritize some study on those topics. With scores in the mid-600s, there's a good chance you still have 1-2 weaknesses that you can address.

2) Which mistakes do you tend to make when you do know the material but fall victim to "careless" or "silly" errors? This is a huge point here - it's really easy to dismiss an incorrect answer as a "silly mistake", but remember that you'll be taking the GMAT under timed conditions with some pressure involved, and that tends to exacerbate those silly mistakes. Try to get a good feel for which types of mistakes you'll make so that you can be aware and double-check for them. If you're scoring around 640 now, I'd bet that just eliminating those kinds of mistakes gets you to 680 or so.

3) How are you pacing yourself? Do you need to cut down your time on certain question types? Can you afford to slow down (and eliminate careless mistakes even more?)? If you need to pick up the pace - most of us do - then you can do some timed pacing drills with those types of questions to train yourself to work faster.

To get your score from the mid-6's to above 700, especially if you've done a bunch of studying already, it's probably a lot less about which books you use and more about how you diagnose your areas of emphasis and attack them specifically.
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep

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