Developing A Plan - 590 > 540 - where do I go from here?

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Hi -

My name is Matt and I have scheduled an exam for February 2011. I have taken the Veritas Course and gone through the first 8 books and done all the questions. I have also gone through the first three MGMAT strategy guides and done all the problems. Unfortunately, when I sit down to write a practice test I dont seem to be making any progress. On my first practice test, when I was completely cold, I scored 590. I thought this was a good base and proceeded. Today, since doing all this work, I wrote a practice test and scored 540. For someone who is hoping to score 720+ this was not a very welcome sign.

I started tonight by creating an error log format in excel, but as I look at all the material and suggestions that are out there for how to prepare for this test I find myself completely overwhelmed and uncertain about where to go from here. I am going to start using the "How To Analyze a Practice Problem" methodology that was posted by Stacey Koprince. However I am worried that I wont have time to do a sufficient number of questions to be adequately prepared.

I have also bought and worked through the problems in OG12 and Quant 2nd ed. as the correspond to the MGMAT strategy guides. Any help from the experts would be greatly appreciated as I am struggling to have this material take hold.

Thank very much,

Matt
Source: — GMAT Strategy |

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by odannyboi » Tue Nov 09, 2010 8:44 pm
Don't worry about your 2nd score.. I've seen alot of people score lower on their 2nd CAT than the first (even after studying for a lot of time).

I myself scored 490 for the first time, studied for a month and then scored 420! I am now up to the early/mid 600s. Since you already went through the material, go back a second time... you may see that it is much easier the second time around. Honestly, it looks like you have timing issues. You may get the material when you practice doing questions but doing a CAT is something totally different. Do a couple more (about 1 per week or 2 in 3 weeks) and you'll really gauge where you are having problems (tally up which type of Qs you get wrong then attack them).

I actually studied since early July and took the real thing in Sept.. cancelled my score. I knew I wasn't ready and I knew I did bad.

The second round, the material is looking easier (I couldn't even do simple rate problems the 1st time around).

Again, just study about an hour or two a day on 1 subject (maybe on DS problems.. really attack them) then take another exam. Then the next one, attack something in verbal (like CR questions). Eventually you will get up to a point where you will be comfortable with all of the material (including taking it under timed conditions). It is working for me (I used to get about half of the DS questions wrong in my CATs... I devoted a few days to just DS and my accuracy improved to about 75% on timed tests.. not too good, but much better than before). Above all... BE CALM. You'd be surprised how well you score will improve just by doing that. Panic and the feeling of being overwhelmed is your worst enemy.

My 2 cents (I'm no expert but I hope it helped)