Enginpasa1 wrote:ok I had a 650 (quant 38 Verbal 41) last week that was raised from a 550.
After 10 days of good good math studies and careful analysis of my mistakes, I took another manhattan gmat exam. I scored a 640 (quant 44 and verbal 34). This is bittersweet for me. I can raise the quant even higher because I didnt even touch geometry review yet. It shows that I can fix the math and I can get even higher. I am bleeding many points from SC and some from CR.
How can I balance raising both scores while not letting each side slip?
Very close please help!
that's an interesting way to phrase the question; the wording makes it sound like a zero-sum game, in which devoting more attention to quant has been
costing you verbal points. of course, that idea doesn't really make sense; the two sections are completely separate, with separate time limits, etc., so the one can't really affect the other.
it
is possible, of course, that you can underperform on verbal due to sheer neglect if you spend
all your time studying quant. but, in your case, that's not a factor; it's only been ten days - not nearly enough time in which to forget lots of material, especially verbal material (which tends to be retained for longer than does quant) - since your last practice test.
don't forget the following fact:
the test has a 30-point standard deviation. roughly, this means that, about 70% of the time, your performance will be within 30 points (either way) of your 'true score' or 'predicted score'. that's already a fairly wide range, but don't forget the other consequence of that statement: the
other 30% of the time, your score will be MORE than 30 points above or below your 'true'/'predicted' score!
in other words, you can't put too much stock in single scores, and you can't put
any stock in extremely small increments. a ten-point loss is slight enough to begin with, but, relative to a 30-point standard deviation, it's totally negligible. as an analogy, if you stepped on the scale and found that you weigh 0.4 pound less than you did last week, you can't really interpret that as weight loss. (weight can fluctuate by several pounds on a regular basis, so that reading could even be consistent with weight
gain!)
so, a brief summary:
* don't worry about small gains and losses; just worry about your entire trajectory of practice tests, which, judging from your posts, is definitely increasing over time
* try not to think of the quant and verbal sections as affecting each other; they are completely independent.
* see your other thread for my notes about useful ways to approach sentence correction.
