I just Beat The GMAT!

I spent three months at the Kaplan centre, did all of their tests, was averaging around the 610 mark in their CATS, then got a 650 in one of the official CAT's. Thought I was ready, but apparently not! I feel I know all the content, I think it may just be my strategy for tackling the questions! I want to apply to LBS round 3 and it goes without saying that I need to get my score up to the 670-680 mark by the 2nd of March.

Any advice from anyone would be welcome, such as what materials to use. Is my goal it at all realistic, or should I just throw in the towel and apply again next year.

Regards,

mdwolman

mdwolman wrote:I spent three months at the Kaplan centre, did all of their tests, was averaging around the 610 mark in their CATS, then got a 650 in one of the official CAT's. Thought I was ready, but apparently not! I feel I know all the content, I think it may just be my strategy for tackling the questions! I want to apply to LBS round 3 and it goes without saying that I need to get my score up to the 670-680 mark by the 2nd of March.

Any advice from anyone would be welcome, such as what materials to use. Is my goal it at all realistic, or should I just throw in the towel and apply again next year.

Regards,

mdwolman

It is not easy to score above 650 if you have prepared and invested your efforts into GMAT. Your score has horned your preparation efforts with 540 for the time being. You would have to change your preparation strategy and need to work on your weak areas profoundly. I noticed that you have subscribed to BTG problem set; launch this online facility and set the difficulty level to 700+. If you manage to score 50(+) % for any given topic in your tests then you can skip this topic by solving problems to maintain your math knowledge applicable to GMAT. Otherwise you would have to look after additional resources to fill in the gaps of your math knowledge for the problematic topics. For the verbal part, it's much easier if you are native speaker - just follow the general rules and tips from BTG numerous posts. We have great resources here for the verbal part of GMAT.


p.s. between us kaplan isn't as promising as it says at the begining... If you are able to ace all material from Kaplan straight math - one example, you are likely to be placed under 45 for the quant on the real thing.

I agree with Night Reader . The improvement you're looking for -of around 140 points-within a time frame of another 40 days is gonna be an uphill task .However, you may wanna give it your best.
The first thing you should do is sit back and ask yourself why didn't you perform well. Secondly, were you sufficiently prepared to tackle the questions on the GMAT? I think that Kaplan Maths is not good enough if you want to be able to tackle Maths. Your Verbal score seems encouraging and if you work on this more, you can probably increase it by another 5-7 points.
Since you've already prepared once and evidently that didn't give you the desired result,so you need a seismic change in your approach.Until and unless you do not do that , you never know you may land up with just a 600 on the next attempt.

I think it's possible but very hard. Your quant score is pretty low and the good news at least IMO is that you can improve your quant score faster than you can with your verbal.