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Shall i quit my dream....or is it monday morning blues

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Shall i quit my dream....or is it monday morning blues

by samsachd » Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:11 pm
Hi,

I m a regular on this site from last 6 months.I stated to study for GMAT some 5 months back with lots of courage and enthu and also with decent amount of time for prepration (my gmat is in the end of this month).
But till late last evening i was just scoring in range of 550's and never been able to finish the exam on time.Shall i quit my dream for a score of 650+ which is a must for school i want to apply.

I tried reading all the study material this site confirms as official:
1) Manhattan SC
2) Powerscore Bible for CR
3) MGMAT notes and IMS notes for Quants brushups.
4) OG11 and OG10(almost complete)
5) Regular vistor of this forum

Some of my moc test results are:

MGMAT 1:530(Q-35 and V-28)
MGMAT 2:500(Q-31 and V-28)
MGMAT 3:580(Q-43 and V-28)
GMAT Prep:510(Q34 and V-28)

In all these exams i felt shortage of time as in the end i was left with 7-8 questions which i always have to guess.
I am not been able to understand why after almost 5 months of efforts i am still standing almost the same place where i started(in my first moctest i scored 500 only).
Although having said all that i still dont want to postpone my exam and give my best shot in next 3 weeks left.(As i dont have much time left after that for preparing my application for schools).

I have a brief study plan which i thought i need your suggestions:
What I need to study every day(weekdays)
1) 2RC(1 long and 1 Short)-time 30mins including review.
2) 20 CR questions-30mins solving and 30 mins review
3) 20 SC question-30 mins solving and 30 mins review
4) 10 PS questions-30mins total
5) 20 DS questions-30 mins solving and 30 mins review.

Total i need to study 4 Hrs each day all this in a very stict time bound manner as time is major concern for me.All this from OG12 official questions set.
Apart from this i m planning to again review MGMAT SC guide, CR tips from PowerscoreBible and some quants i am facing problem in (probability,ineqality etc) on weekends. And also 1 Moc test each weekend till exam to see where i m improving and where i am not.
WIll this study plan help me in improving my score a bit or shall i refine it a bit.
I also read and heard from ppl that GMAT has gone a lot tougher now and that gives me more reasons to worry as it will further lower my actual GMAT score.

Need your urgent inputs for this and whatever suggestions you can give which i can use to improve my score in next 3 weeks is always welcome.
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by beatthegmat » Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:54 pm
To answer your question from your post's subject line: NO, you should not quite your dream! Don't let a stupid test get between you and your MBA dreams!

That being said, I do think that you may have some issues with your how you are approaching your studies. Preparing for 5 months with very little incremental improvements leads me to believe that your approach to study has not been effective. Sometimes it is not about the time you've spent in studying, but how tactical you've been in your studies.

Can you tell us more details about HOW you are reviewing your practice sets and practice tests? The more detail the better. Once we have that data, we may be able to figure out the root causes of your current prep style and create a plan that works for you.

Good luck!
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by glorydefined » Sun Oct 04, 2009 8:52 pm
Hold on!! i think you should watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-MRoIDX ... re=related

By the way, I also felt the same after prepering for 3 months and ending up in similar score as yours. But then I analyzed the previous tests I had taken and saw where I was missing.I too ran out of time and ended up guessing on the last 9 to 10 questions in each section (which would almost always be wrong) and that hurt my score. And also I have read about many people in the forum that they had atleast 2 minutes to spare on each section towards the end if not more, and that put a question in my head "Where could I be going WRONG?????"...so I looked up all the tests so far and saw that I am almost sloving each and every data sufficiency question, where these question only ask if the information given is enough to solve the question or not. Then I took two tests taking an oath that I am not going to solve a DS question and quickly move to the next the moment I get to know if the question could be solved or not. And believe me that saved a LOOOOT of time... and I had time to go through all the questions. Although Ive read this a 1000 times not to solve any DS question, but guess I ignored all of it unless and had to learn the hard way :(
I am pretty sure, you are going through the same. If yes, please try my suggestion it will work.
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by beatthegmat » Mon Oct 05, 2009 12:45 pm
Wow, what a video. :)
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by samsachd » Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:31 pm
Hi Eric,

Thanks for the reply.
After your post i today again reviewed all the moc tests again and now found out something credential.

1) In Quants i am failing on number of topics ranging from Rate and Work to Divisibility and Primes to Exponents to Combinatorics to Statistics to Inequality to Coordinate Gemotery.
This is what i saw common topics in ALL the 4 Moc tests i completed so far.

2) Also 1 important point i noticed is that i am not able to solve any 700-800 bucket questions and 50% of 600-700 questions.This is irrespective of my preperation for that topic.

3) Third as i said i always stuggle to finish on time as i get stuck up with earlier questions during tests.

4) For Verbal i found out that I was more or less scoring consistently 28 score.Again individual topic's score vary in that.

5) For SC i usually made most of time careless mistakes.For CR Weaken questions are mostly with redcolor.

6) Again in RC i am really comfortable but timing is an issue which comes into picture for last 9-10 questions always here also.

But having said that i still thing my Verbal is better than Quants which is in real bad shape now and considering that i am from that "Typical India Strong in Quant People" bracket.

This is what i figured out so far but tell me if you need some more info.Also plz tell me about my study plan for next 3 weeks mentioned below.

And BTW the vedio was really awesome :) Thanks for the inputs glorydefined.
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by beatthegmat » Tue Oct 06, 2009 2:28 pm
This is a very good start. Great job in going back to analyze your performance, there are definitely some clear areas now to improve your performance.

Three weeks isn't that much time to prep, so what you may want to do is organize a strategy that focuses on a few areas which you think you could improve very easily (the low hanging fruit), vs try to spread yourself thin and work on all the areas you mentioned.

The low hanging fruit that I see:

(1) You mentioned that you make a lot of careless mistakes on SC. 95% of the time this means that you are rushing through these questions. The solution would be to deliberately...slow...down...when you get to these problems, to make sure you're answering these questions appropriately.

(2) Another low-hanging fruit I see is pacing. You said that you struggle to finish your quant section because you get stuck on earlier questions. Do lots of practice sets with a timer, and get used to forcing yourself to guess after 90 seconds on a problem. I call this a 'low-hanging fruit', but the reality is that it's psychologically tough to do this because many cases you will be able to answer the question with more time. But your results will improve if you force yourself to guess as a means to allot yourself the appropriate time to solve subsequent questions.

Those are the areas I would focus most my attention. Three weeks isn't much time to prep, but it may be enough to improve these two things and thus improve your performance. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this.
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by virtuoso902 » Tue Oct 06, 2009 3:07 pm
never give up never surrender!!

if what you're doing is not working switch it up and try something new.

Good luck!
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by samsachd » Wed Oct 07, 2009 11:06 pm
Thnks for your reply Eric and virtuoso902.

Question to you virtuoso902 now is can you suggest me what can be switch plan?

Value your feedback.

Thnks
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by virtuoso902 » Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:12 am
Take another practice test but really analyze to the best of your ability this time. Find out what questions you are taking the most time on and are missing. You have to either miss those questions faster or get them right.

Find your biggest hole and plug that.

try going back to studying one thing for 2 weeks. For example if sentence correction is the biggest hole in your game. Spend 2 weeks studying and doing questions from that. Take the time to really analyze why you are weak with it. Is it because you cannot identify what kind of mistakes there are? Is it because you can identify the mistakes but it is taking too long? Look through all of the possibilities. Immerse yourself in SC for 2 weeks then move onto your next weak spot say quant for example. Do 2 weeks of analyzing your quant skills while doing 10 problems a day from SC so that you don't forget it.

Good luck !!
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by LifetimesofSC » Thu Oct 15, 2009 11:39 am
that video is ''out of scope''.

I rather see a photo of Phelps at a party.


And your scoring the same as me. Please realize that these responses are from 90%tile test takers and since GMAT uses percentage of test takers rather than percent of correct questions, we are F*#$*d. Sorry to be a dream crusher but this board is filled with those who most likely caused average test takers to re-take the GMAT.
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by dbaGMAT123 » Thu Oct 15, 2009 7:53 pm
samsachd,

I am very sorry to hear about what is happening.

I would ask the following questions:
(1) When you work problems, do you return to the problems you got wrong?
(2) Do you write notes about what you got wrong in questions?
(3) How thoroughly do you go through the books?
(4) To what extent have you actually worked to learn the content?


I think that one major issue that I have had is that I am doing test prep, but I am not learning and mastering the content. I think this is probably one of the biggest issues.

In order to learn the content, I would highly recommend the entire Manhattan curriculum books and this online GMAT study guide.
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