Hey raunekk
Nice to see a military person on here. I assume by merchant navy, you are referring to the merchant marines? One of my best friends went to he merchant marine academy and just finished his training down in Pensacola.
I am going to respond to both of your posts at the same time.
Firstly, yes I do think almost anyone is capable of scoring a 700 on the GMAT so don't give up!!
That being said, every person requires a slightly different approach to studying and in your case, the method that most of us are using on this website doesn't seem to be working. My roommate had a similar problem to yours. She couldn't break the high 500's after 2 months of studying. We actually came up with a different strategy and her practices are much better now (680-730), but it’s not something you can pull off in a week.
In both of your cases I think the difficulty is not unfamiliarity with the gmat or the question types but more on a fundamental level of math and reading. Here are my general recommendations’ regarding your studying habits. I will follow that with my strategy.
1) You need to lay-off studying for a week or two- take a complete break and stop worrying over it. After 5 months, part of your problem is sheer burnout
2) In general, you are studying way too much. If you read my post on how I studied for my gmat, you will see that I rarely spent more than 3 hours studying. My recommendation is to study 6 days a week - dedicate 2 hours of uninterrupted time for 5 days and have 1 "long day" for 4 hours (the length of an exam). The only time you should study significantly more than that might be the 1-2 weeks before your actual exam. Make sure to take one day completely off from studying every week
3) Relax - it’s been proven that nerves, anger, and frustration worsen your memory and performance. If things are going badly one night or something comes up in your personal life then take a break from studying for a few days – its counterproductive to be too focused on studying. Don't let the gmat take over your life.
That being said...my strategy for you involves not studying the gmat for about 1-2 months. Instead you need to focus on improving your base math and reading skills. Every day my friend tried to do the following
1) Read 30 minutes of English Literature NOT a regular fiction book (ask if you need ideas)
2) Read 30 minutes of a Nonfiction book - try history, philosophy, pysch, autobiographies - try getting something in which the author is pushing a theory or analyzing something instead of a book that is just a summary of concepts or events.
3) 15-30 minutes of basic mathematics: +, -, /, *: There are a couple of websites out there that will time you while doing these so just Google them. Try doing up to 2 digit *,/ and 4 digit +, - in your head (ex: 27*32 = 864) as quickly and accurately as possible
4) 15-30 minutes of algebra and factoring. You will need to find a resource or a book that just has tons and tons and tons of factoring, simplifying and solving of algebra questions
5) Add 15-30 minutes of practice problems in geometry the last week or two
6) You can also try things like sodoku, Math mind teasers etc to break up the flow when you get tired of the other practices
7) You can occasionally slip in a well written literature from - normal fiction novels, articles from a newspaper (I recommend the wall street journal), online articles, magazines (Popular science, national geographic) to add variety
You will need to do these with the following goals in mind:
English: Read faster, notice how they write, think of what ideas they are trying to present and why they are valid/invalid in your opinion
Math: Get faster with greater accuracy. I am always amazed how sometimes I can just brute force my way through a math problem with some good mental math.
Obviously you can edit this schedule a bit. If you want to read one book at a time or read only one book each day that’s fine. Whatever feels most comfortable to you. On your long day, just double the times listed above
After 1-2 months of this, you should see some progress. At this point I recommend another 1-2 months, but this time replace 1/2 your reading and math with problems from the gmat. The easy ones are fine, but I want you to approach them differently. For all of the English problems, I want you to try and answer the question before looking at the choices. See how close your answer is to the actual answer and then make sure to review the right and wrong answers. For the math problems:
1) Do some of the problem backswords (plug the answers into the data provided by the problem) – you can solve about ½ the gmat questions faster like this and it needs to be practiced so you can determine when it works best for you
2) Don’t use letters unless necessary. Fake numbers work so much better:
Example: If machine A can takes 4 hours to finish a task and machine b takes 9 hours to do the same take how long will it take them to do it together (solving using “fake numbers”)
Task is to make 36 widgets. Therefore A makes 9 widgets an hours and B makes 4 widgets an hour. Together they make 13 widgets an hour, so it takes them 36/13 hours
Yes there is a formula for this(it’s a*b/a+b I think), but its not one I want to remember. I used the above method for almost every rate problem like this
1) Try coming up with an answer in under 10 seconds in your head before looking at the answer choices – if you weren’t close, try to understand why.
Focus your other half of the time on repeating the basic exercises (#1-6) whatever you still are feeling weaker on
Spend the last 4-8 weeks getting ready to ace your gmat
Let me know if you need clarifications as this was a long and hastily written post
