GMAT Strategy

Hi everyone,

I'm studying for the GMAT and realized I needed a little external motivation. Hoping this forum can help me out.

My Story
I took the GMAT for the first time back in 2013 and got a 530 (32Q 30V). I had taken a Princeton Review class at work but towards the last month of studying I completely lost all motivation because I was so stressed out at work. It was also my first year out of college so I didn't really know how to balance both. I ended up slacking after getting a few ~640s on practice tests and was really disappointed in myself.

I finally got the courage to study again and started to review my old materials mid-Jan. I've scheduled my test for the first week of May (~2 months left) and I'm getting nervous that I'm not putting enough time in. I'm having a hard time staying focused after an entire's day work.

I'm using the Magoosh 3 month study plan and the MGMAT practice tests which I really like. In my most recent practice test I scored a 570 (36Q 30V), which made me realize that I hadn't improved AT ALL in verbal. It looks like my biggest weakness is Sentence Correction.

Any tips on how to incorporate studying into your work week and staying focused? Would also love any tips on how to improve on Sent. Correction.

My goal is a 680+ and I think I can achieve it.

Thanks!
Achala

Hi Achala.

One way to motivate yourself is change the way you are preparing.

For one thing, you could call what you are doing training rather than studying, because in a sense what you are doing is training for a game, the GMAT game.

Another thing that can really help is working on what is annoying you or what you are curious about rather than what a study plan is telling you to work on.

For instance, if you tend to have trouble with sentence correction, or with some type of quant question, work on what you having trouble with. In my own training I found that I would be curious about or annoyed by something, and that getting myself to work on what I was curious about or annoyed by was not very difficult.

If you are curious about how some people always get those absolute value questions right, work on absolute value. If you are annoyed that you took so long to answer a question involving triangles, work on triangle stuff.

Another thing that you could do is to treat preparing more like playing a video game. You can do topic focused practice sets of questions and see how many you can get right. If you are not satisfied, learn some more about the topic you just worked on and do another set. Shoot for a high hit rate. Can you get 80% right? 90%?

Make it fun.

Regarding improving in verbal, in particular in SC, the video game model can be a good one there too. You could slow waaaaay down, taking 10 minutes or more per practice question and shoot for a high hit rate.

If you were to take 15 minutes per verbal question, could you get 90 - 100% right? If not, then something about the processes you use when handling verbal questions has to be changed. Maybe you are not paying enough attention to logic and details.

Are you clear about what is going on in CR questions? Are you looking for meaning in SC questions? Are you really clear about what RC passages do or do not say?

GMAT verbal is largely a test of vision. So slow down when doing the questions and work on seeing what you need to see in order to score higher. After a while, seeing the logic and details will come more naturally to you and at that point you will be able to get the questions right more quickly.

Overall, just keep doing some work regularly and you may find that you get so accustomed to doing some GMAT stuff every evening that doing it becomes easier than not doing it. You can even see it as a way to relax and unwind.

achala wrote:Hi everyone,

I'm studying for the GMAT and realized I needed a little external motivation. Hoping this forum can help me out.

My Story
I took the GMAT for the first time back in 2013 and got a 530 (32Q 30V). I had taken a Princeton Review class at work but towards the last month of studying I completely lost all motivation because I was so stressed out at work. It was also my first year out of college so I didn't really know how to balance both. I ended up slacking after getting a few ~640s on practice tests and was really disappointed in myself.

I finally got the courage to study again and started to review my old materials mid-Jan. I've scheduled my test for the first week of May (~2 months left) and I'm getting nervous that I'm not putting enough time in. I'm having a hard time staying focused after an entire's day work.

I'm using the Magoosh 3 month study plan and the MGMAT practice tests which I really like. In my most recent practice test I scored a 570 (36Q 30V), which made me realize that I hadn't improved AT ALL in verbal. It looks like my biggest weakness is Sentence Correction.

Any tips on how to incorporate studying into your work week and staying focused? Would also love any tips on how to improve on Sent. Correction.

My goal is a 680+ and I think I can achieve it.

Thanks!
Achala

Hi Achala,

Where your focus seems to be on Verbal more, I find you have much greater scope of improvement in Quant.

Your score of 32 in Quant can easily be improved to a score of 42 to 45 (Guaranteed) as it's very easy by trying to get a grip on easy concepts of Quant.

This improvement in Quant itself can contribute 90-100 marks in you Total GMAT score which will be a big boost for you to keep motivated and work harder to achieve your final target of 680

A balanced score for you to achive a score of 680 will be Quat-46 and Verbal 39

So you can see how much improvement and where is needed.

The good news is that improving in Quant is easy and it happens in a very short span of time.

The access to good reading material is not the key to success, Absorbing the value addition through that content is.

2 months is not a lot of time to work on focus and content both. You probably need a Discipline and guidence to work on them all ... You might consider taking some classes in that case.

We provide a FREE assessment Live class through SKYPE so if you are interested in taking expert help and an assessment session then feel free to connect.