I received a PM asking for my advice on this and also asking:
RC
- Should I start reading complex topics from e.g., McKinseyQuarterly to get familiar with RC?
- I am quite comfortable with general strategies of answering RC Qs, but I didn't have particular strategies for types of passages: Science, History, and Business etc...Should I build them?
CR
- I follow MGMAT strategy of understanding each line making notes and tagging it with a P or a C. Towards the end of the test, I think I got bored of doing so much scratchwork that I didn't make proper notes. I think it was a reason of doing badly in CR. Getting bored and not making proper notes is not good. Should I stick to making notes or should I follow a different strategy this time?
- Should I go for CR Bible?
SC
- What materials should I cover now?
QUANTS
- I have to increase my Quants score to 50. How?
- Should I go for Kap800?
It sounds like you had an issue with both stamina and timing on the verbal section - both of those together can really hurt you. You said your time management "could have been better" for the last third of the verbal questions and this is also when you stopped doing what you'd trained yourself to do for CR, so fatigue was kicking in.
Did you take the essays during your practice tests? Did you take the 10 minute breaks during the real test and have something to eat and drink? Etc. (And I suspect you already know that you shouldn't take the quant and verbal sections separately - but just to repeat... don't do that.
)
I'm going to assume that your "gut" feelings about the different question types on the test were right, but do go look at the data from your last practice test or two before the real test to make sure. Did you really do well with SC and RC main idea, but struggle with some of the other stuff, as you felt you did on test day? Or is your "gut" a little bit wrong?
Think about why RC was more difficult for you on the real test. Are there certain passage types / topics that you don't like? (eg, a lot of people don't like the science passages and tend to do more poorly on them) Was there something you found especially confusing / difficult about the passage? What / why? Generally speaking, most people have a least favorite type of passage (hard science, business, social science), so know what that is for you and spend some more time studying those. Make sure to study how those passages tend to be structured, why the wrong answers are wrong, etc.
A colleague of mine did some research about reading sources that mimic the GMAT a bit. Here are the sources he found to be a good match:
It's been a decade since I last looked at a McKinsey article, so I don't remember how well that source would mimic a GMAT passage - sorry I can't advise there.
For CR, I'm guessing both timing and fatigue factored into this. Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to start using a new technique in the middle of the test (and dropping the old way you used to do something is, in fact, a new technique). I do like diagramming but I don't think you need to do the same level of diagram on every problem, nor do I think each person needs to write the same amount. Some people write only the conclusion because they have good short-term memories and find that they can remember most of what they need to know for the next 2 minutes. Some people write very little on arguments that seem easy to them, but write more on arguments that are more convoluted or confusing. It's fine to do that - as long as you practice it ahead of time and (a) know what works for you, and (b) stick with a consistent process. The process of diagramming / taking notes is not actually about the notes themselves. It's about training your brain to think analytically about what you're reading while you're reading it, and to focus on the most important stuff right from the start (and to know what is likely to be most important even on that first read-through).
So it sounds like you might need a bit more work on extracting information from arguments and analyzing that information. It's also useful to study (for both RC and CR):
- why wrong answers are wrong (in addition to why right answers are right)
- structure of information presented
--- for RC: background info vs. "The Big Point" (TBP) vs. supporting evidence for TBP
--- for CR: facts vs. claims, intermediate claims serving as premises vs. "overall" claim serving as conclusion
- how the wording of the question can help you to:
--- identify the question type (eg, weaken, explain)
--- find the conclusion (right in the question stem, lots of questions have either the conclusion or "keywords" pointing to the conclusion in the argument text)*
* For this reason, I prefer to read the question before I read the argument. If you haven't been doing this, you might want to take a look at whether doing so will be helpful to you.
It sounds like you do know the content for SC and quant (though I'm going more on your stated comfort with SC - there's no way for me to know for sure without working with you directly!). You may have some areas you need to review as far as content is concerned. With a Q47, you pretty much know most of the math and it's probably coming down to (a) some more obscure math rules / concepts, and (b) technique on harder questions - being able to figure out what they're asking and break things down into a doable 2-min process. So that's going to come down more to practice than anything else and I would go back to OG here. Look for the weird rules they test in the hardest problems and look for multiple ways of approaching those problems. Then look for connections between problems so that you can answer this question: how will I RECOGNIZE a similar problem of this same type in the future, so that I know what to do (that is, I don't have to figure it out from scratch)?
Same with SC - it's probably a combination of not knowing some of the more obscure things that can be tested and falling into traps (eg, picking what sounds good rather than what's actually grammatically correct). And here again I'd go back to OG. (When you start talking about the more obscure things, it's important to study from the source - because there are innumberable "obscure things" that could be tested. It could take you forever to study them all. So it's worth studying the ones that have actually showed up on official questions in the past - and the OG is the way to find those. It's generally not worth studying a bunch of obscure stuff from other sources b/c who knows whether that stuff would ever actually show up on the test?
For RC and CR, you do have some additional work to do out of OG as well. Those are the hardest question types for test-prep companies to mimic, so you want to make sure that you study structure and "why are the wrong answers wrong" stuff from official sources.
For all of these, you may also want to supplement with some new material so that you aren't only going over questions you've done before. I'd ask around the forums to see what other sources people prefer. You may also want to try GMAT Focus for the quant - this contains official, released test questions that are not found in OG or GMAT Prep. You do have to pay for it, but it's not too terribly expensive. (Unfortunately, they haven't yet released GMAT Focus for verbal.)
Oh - and of course your mental state leading into the test can make a big difference. Don't schedule any job interviews, major work deadlines, big stressful family events, or anything like that in the several days (or even the week!) before the test.
