GMAT Strategy

I wrote the GMAT in April (680 - 47/36) and I'm looking to bump my mark up about 30-40 points.

The first go around I purchased the 8-pack of MGMAT books and went through them myself and did the 6 practice CATs and two official GMAC tests. My final score ended up being approximately at what I was for all of my practice tests. The one thing I think I need to do better on - and may need help with - is debriefing the results of each CAT that I take.

I'm wondering if anyone has a recommendation on an approach to take to squeeze out the extra 40 points. I was considering signing up for a self-study program through either Kaplan or MGMAT but wondering if it would really benefit me in the end, as I have a decent knowledge of the basics, I think it will be a matter of refining my strategy.

I'd like to try and write for the beginning of February, so looking just over two months to go over it all again.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Have you been logging enough data to make the determination of areas of weakness? Timing? Test anxiety? Quant? Verbal? Rate/work problems with hypothetical? That would be the first step, then plan from there. If you post some of your info about weaknesses I might be able to give some more specific insight.

Saw the post in your sig, awesome! And congrats!

I've always been fairly even in terms of my strength in Quant vs. Verbal as you can see in my test score. As it's been awhile since I took it I'm going to need to get back into it and see where I am. It's hard to identify weaknesses because I'm kind of average at everything from what I was seeing - I think part of the problem is that I need help identifying where I'm weak.

Any tips as to where I can start?

nutsngum wrote:Saw the post in your sig, awesome! And congrats!

I've always been fairly even in terms of my strength in Quant vs. Verbal as you can see in my test score. As it's been awhile since I took it I'm going to need to get back into it and see where I am. It's hard to identify weaknesses because I'm kind of average at everything from what I was seeing - I think part of the problem is that I need help identifying where I'm weak.

Any tips as to where I can start?

For each problem that I solved, I logged the following:

• Right or Wrong
  
  Time to do problem
  
  During what phase of the problem did I make a mistake? (understand, plan, solve)
  
  Approximate difficulty level (for quant I used Manhattans guide for this, for verbal I just assumed that the question number was proportional to the level of difficulty)
  
  What was the question type? (For quant its PS or DS, for verbal its RC, SC, CR)
  
  What was the question sub-type? (For quant I used Manhattans classifications which were like inequality, remainder, Rate-Work-Distance, etc, for SC it was parallelism, subject-verb, modifier, etc, for RC it was global, detail, inference and for CR I used powerscores classification like strengthen, weaken, evaluate, etc)
  
  On the quant I actually went as far as to "super categorize" the problems into arithmetic, algebra or geometry.

Now after logging all that stuff I was able to pinpoint precisely where my problems were. As an example I was both long and inaccurate on 500-600 RWD problems. That was really dumping my score. Each sprint (week) I would pick two of those weaknesses and focus on them. By focus I do mean doing problems, but also restrategizing for that type of problem, rereading material, watching Thursdays with Ron, etc. That technique resulted in an almost linear increase of my score each week (about 20 points).

I think you'll be surprised when you see the results of that analysis. And if it does say you don't have any particular weaknesses that good data too! Just pick one area and focus on it until you improve.

When you say you went long, I know that Quants are ~2 minutes per questions. What about verbal? I mean the first RC question is always going to take you substantially longer, and SC will be much shorter.

Did you have a guideline for timeframes for each type of question?

nutsngum wrote:When you say you went long, I know that Quants are ~2 minutes per questions. What about verbal? I mean the first RC question is always going to take you substantially longer, and SC will be much shorter.

Did you have a guideline for timeframes for each type of question?

That's a good question. I think verbal can be a little more personalized than Quant. However here is the guideline that I used:

SC: 1:30 per question
CR: 1:50 per question
RC: 8:00 per passage

I think its standard for RC to have 4 associated questions although I'm not sure (if someone else could chime in on that I would be grateful). The 8:00 per passage is based on that assumption. Personally however I usually didn't need 8:00 per passage; it only took me about 1-1:30 to read through the passage the first time and about 1:15 per question. That gives me the little slack that I need for those questions you just can't let go of! As far as that goes just figure out what works for you. If you are an SC wizard you can give yourself a little more time on the RC, etc.